Stratfor
July 29, 2009 | 1630 GMT
Summary
Fighting continued July 29 in Iraq’s eastern Diyala province at Camp Ashraf, the home of 3,360 members of the Iranian exile group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK). Reportedly, six people have been killed and hundreds of others have been injured, although these claims have not been confirmed.Analysis
Clashes continued July 29 at Camp Ashraf in Iraq’s eastern province of Diyala after hundreds of Iraqi police and soldiers raided the army base that houses some 3,360 members of an exiled Iranian opposition group. The opposition group, a Marxist-based Islamist group called the Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK), claims that six people have been killed and hundreds injured, though these claims have not been verified.
The reasons for the raid remain unclear, but it is likely that Iran may have directly prompted the raid or that the United States gently prodded the Iraqis to conduct the raid to affect domestic Iranian developments.
Members of the MeK have been holed up in Camp Ashraf since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The MeK has long been a thorn in Iran’s side; the group began an armed campaign against the clerical regime in 1965 and has since awaited an opportunity to bring down the mullahs. The MeK found a natural ally next door in Iraq, where then-leader Saddam Hussein welcomed the chance to pressure its Persian neighbor during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. When Hussein became an American target in 2003, the MeK had a plan to launch a major offensive against Iran — an operation called “The Black Phase.” At the time, however, the United States decided it needed Iran’s support in conducting the invasion of Iraq, and, in back-channel negotiations, agreed to disarm the MeK and keep them contained at Camp Ashraf under the watch of U.S. soldiers and private security contractors. As Iran’s tumultuous negotiations with the United States continued on and off over the past six years, the MeK card developed into a useful bargaining chip for Washington. As far as Iran was concerned, the United States had a hardcore anti-Iranian militant asset that could be used in covert action schemes against Iran should Washington think it necessary to rattle the clerical regime.
In a confidence-building measure, however, the United States and Iran reached a behind-the-scenes deal around September 2008 in which Washington agreed it would hand over the camp to Iraqi authorities within six months. From there, it would be mostly up to Baghdad to decide the MeK’s fate. Extraditing the MeK members to Iran would be tantamount to sentencing them to death, but staying in Iraq is not much of an option either. Iraq’s Shiite and Kurdish populations have deeply resented the MeK for its participation in crackdowns during the Hussein era. Moreover, Iraq’s now Shite-dominated Interior Ministry — which is flooded with allies of Iran — has an obligation to Tehran to ensure the MeK is stamped out for good.
When the United States finally handed over control of Camp Ashraf to Iraqi authorities three months ago, it was bracing for such a conflagration. The process to extradite the MeK members to Europe has been slow, and tensions have been building in Diyala over the MeK’s continued presence. However, this latest raid is unlikely to have been a completely spontaneous event.
Iraqi security authorities claim that according to the Status of Forces Agreement signed between Washington and Baghdad, it was fully within their rights to storm the camp. An unlikely coincidence, the raid occurred the same day U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates paid a visit to Iraq to discuss the next steps in the U.S. withdrawal and to highlight the endurance of the United States’ defense relationship with the Iraqis. Soon thereafter, Iranian Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani — a powerful figure within the Iranian ruling elite — said July 29 that Iran welcomed the move by Iraqi authorities to clear Iraqi territory of “terrorists,” even if the move came late.
We see two possible paths that could have led to this event, and they are not mutually exclusive.
First, the Iranians could very well have had a direct hand in prompting the raid. Larijani’s statement appears to have been a calibrated move to remind Washington of the leverage Tehran holds in Baghdad to neutralize threats across its border. U.S. and Israeli saber-rattling against Iran has increased since the June Iranian election crisis, and Tehran is under increasing pressure to demonstrate to the United States that it has the levers in place to seriously complicate the U.S. position in Iraq if sufficiently provoked. At the same time, the United States has a pressing need to take a step back from Iraq and focus on competing threats farther east in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gates even announced July 29 that the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq could be accelerated this year to leave 11 instead of 12 brigades in place ahead of the January 2010 parliamentary elections. Iran can clearly see the U.S. urgency to reduce its commitment to Iraq, but in looking out for its own security, the Iranians appear to be signaling through the MeK clashes that Washington’s timetable for the withdrawal is still contingent on Iranian cooperation.
But despite Iran’s very real influence in Iraq, it is a stretch to think that the Americans could not have stopped the raid if desired. Statements from the State Department were pointedly calm, with spokesman Ian Kelly saying little more than that Washington was “watching” and “monitoring” events. This brings us to the second possibility: that the United States actually nudged the Iraqis to launch the raid in an effort to influence internal Iranian developments.
Larijani is part of the Iranian faction led by Expediency Council chief Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the most powerful clerics in Iran. Rafsanjani has emerged as the primary counterweight to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the two are locked in a struggle over the leadership of the country. Ahmadinejad appears to be moving toward aligning with Russia, and a Russian-Iranian alliance would be one that poses a much more serious threat to U.S. interests than anything that Iran could muster by itself. Rafsanjani is attempting to convince fence-sitters in Iran that the United States cannot tolerate such an alignment as it would force the Americans to take steps to neutralize Iran (i.e. war), and that a different path needs to be followed. In this light, the Americans’ allowing the drubbing of the MeK could simply be the granting of a card to Rafsanjani’s faction to be used in Iran’s internal debates: proof that the United States is willing to offer carrots (in this case, partial liquidation of the MeK) as well as sticks.
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