The killings of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani and a top Iraqi paramilitary chief in a US strike on Baghdad Friday threaten to drag Iraq into the abyss of regional conflict, analysts have warned, like reported by toi.com.

The US strike on Baghdad international airport targeted a convoy carrying Soleimani and his top Baghdad-based adviser Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy head of Iraq’s powerful Popular Mobilization Force (PMF).

The raid has confirmed the worst fears of many Iraqis: that their homeland will become the main battlefield in a looming conflict between Iran and the United States.

“Iran’s strongest cards are in Iraq, and I think that Iraq will pay the price for this,” said Fanar Haddad of Singapore University’s Middle East Institute.

Tensions between the United States and Iran have been rising for months, as Washington accused Tehran-backed factions of firing rockets on their troops across Iraq and on their embassy in Baghdad.

But they have soared over the past week.

On December 27, a rocket attack killed a US contractor working in northern Iraq, prompting retaliatory US strikes that killed 25 fighters from Kataeb Hezbollah, a hardline PMF faction.

Angry PMF supporters laid siege to the US embassy as Washington announced hundreds of new US troops were en route to the region.

Path to war?

But Washington delivered its most decisive blow yet early Friday with a volley of strikes near Baghdad international airport, leaving two cars torched on the access highway.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed Soleimani was killed in the strike, while the PMF announced Muhandis’s death.

With the two dead, the Quds Force — the foreign operations arm of Iran’s Guards Corps — has been left decapitated and the PMF has lost its de facto chief.

Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “severe revenge” for the raid, and the Islamic republic’s top security council was meeting to discuss options.

Analysts said the outbreak of a wider conflict was looking increasingly likely.

“If Iran does need to respond and make a performance out of this, the fear is that there will be something more than just… rockets at embassies,” said Haddad.

“It could set Iraq along the path of internal conflict, and that’s something Iran can very easily instigate,” he said.

The nature of the strike is unprecedented because of the seniority of those targeted, making its repercussions hard to picture, said Ramzy Mardini, a researcher at the US Institute of Peace.

“The problem with judging what happens next is a problem of imagination. Nobody thought this was in the realm of possibility,” he told AFP.

“It’s likely that all actors on all sides will be playing things by ear in the short term, which is a recipe for miscalculation,” said Mardini.

‘Heads will roll’
Friday’s strike shows that Iran could no longer use its allies in Iraq to carry out attacks against US interests “without risking an American conventional retaliation on Iran,” Mardini told AFP.

“Plausible deniability has gone out the window,” he said.

The US had expressed increasing frustration with the escalating rocket attacks on its 5,200 troops in Iraq and on its embassy in Baghdad over the past two months.

US forces led the 2003 invasion against then-dictator Saddam Hussein and Washington has worked closely with Iraqi officials and commanders since then.

But its influence has waned compared with that of Iran, which carefully crafted personal ties with Iraqi politicians and armed factions, even during Saddam’s reign.

Soleimani was the prime example, sweeping into Baghdad regularly to hold meeting with top Iraqi officials during times of turmoil.

Ranj Alaaldin, a fellow at the Brookings Institution in Doha, said that would leave Iran with a range of questions for its Iraqi partners.

“How did the US know of Soleimani’s arrival in Baghdad? Who leaked the intel?” Alaaldin tweeted.

“Watch the Iraqi political space. Heads will roll.”

Top U.S. national security advisers provided President Trump with expanded military options targeting Iran and its proxies late Sunday after U.S. forces launched successful airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias threatening U.S. troops in Iraq, like reported by washingtontimes.com.

The president was briefed on the U.S. strikes launched earlier Sunday, in a meeting with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.

Mr. Esper said the briefing presented Mr. Trump with options for “additional actions as necessary to ensure that we act in our own self-defense and we deter further bad behavior from militia groups or from Iran.” The high-level discussion was held at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he is spending the holidays.

The U.S. airstrikes Sunday by F-15 Strike Eagles included three targets in western Iraq and two in eastern Syria that were command-and-control facilities or weapons stockpiles of the Iranian-sponsored militia Kata’ib Hezbollah, Mr. Esper said. The Shiite militia is controlled and armed by Iran.

“The strikes were successful,” he said. “The pilots and aircraft returned back to base safely.”

U.S. officials said the militia carried out attacks on joint Iraq-U.S. facilities housing U.S. military forces.

Mr. Pompeo said the attack by the Iranian-backed militia had “threatened American forces” stationed in Iraq. In the past two months, the group has carried out 11 rocket attacks on military bases where U.S. soldiers were present.

In the wake of the Israeli attack in Syria on dozens of Assad and Iranian Quds force targets in response to the four rocket launches to the Golan, Iranian Houthi insurgent spokesmen supported by Iran stated: “Our army could hit the depths of Israel’s occupied territories.” At the same time, Russia has reported: Israel has attacked Syria four times this month – with indecent actions that threaten the stability of the region, like reported by inn.com.

According to a report on PressTV, a media affiliate of the Iranian regime, a spokesman for the Houthi forces said his fighters were “fully prepared to respond to the Tel Aviv regime in case the Israeli military commits an act of aggression.”

The spokesman, General Yihya Sari, claimed that Israel had “aspirations in Yemen” and in the Persian Gulf region – and, if it tries to fulfill its aspirations, “Yemenis would not hesitate to respond to Israeli folly.” In a direct threat to Jerusalem, he said the rebels had the ability to hit “deep in the occupied territories”, among other things by means of unmanned missiles and aircraft.

Meanwhile the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement addressing four alleged Israeli attacks in Syria. The statement read that on December 12, on the day of the fighting in the south, Israel attempted to eliminate senior Islamic Jihad operative al-Ajuri, in the center of Damascus, “whose home was used for diplomatic purposes” – an Israeli source said he used the venue to mediate between various organizations. The attack, according to the Russians, killed civilians and did significant damage to buildings but, according to the announcement, the senior jihadi emerged unharmed.

Russia claimed that six days later, Israel carried out an attack on the Syrian-Iraq border during which fighter jets used Jordan’s airspace. The widespread attack by the IDF against Syrian army and Iranian Quds Force targets was carried out with 40 cruise missiles.

“These events are of great concern to Moscow,” the Russian Foreign Ministry statement said. “We believe it is a must to respect and preserve Syrian sovereignty and its territories and that of other countries of the region. So far, Israeli actions have intensified the tension around Syria and the potential for conflict and are contrary to normalization efforts and achieving stability and political settlement in Syria.”

A Saudi Arabian tugboat was seized by Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on Sunday, according to the state-run Saudi Press Agency SPA.

The vessel was towing a South Korean drilling rig in the south of the Red Sea when it “fell under hijacking and armed robbery by two boats,” Saudi military spokesman Colonel Turki al-Malki told a news conference, SPA reported. He did not say how many crew members were aboard the ship.
The Saudi ship was reportedly among three vessels seized within 3 miles (4.8 km) off Uqban island and taken to the Salif port in western Yemen, according to the Houthi-run Al-Masirah news agency. Al-Masirah did not report on the origin of the other two ships.

Two South Koreans were among those captured, Kim In-chul, a spokesman for South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs confirmed on Tuesday.
“The South Korean nationals on the captive ships are safe and healthy and their families have been notified.” Kim said.

Major shipping route
The Red Sea is a major oil shipping route, bordered to the north and west by the African nations of Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea and Djibouti, and by Saudi Arabia and Yemen to the east.

A series of attacks on oil tankers and production facilities in the region has increased tensions in recent months, including drone strikes on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq oil processing facility — the largest of its kind in the world — in September, which halved the country’s production.
Houthi rebels claimed responsibility for the attack, but both Saudi and US investigators claimed “with very high probability” that it was launched from an Iranian base.

Seizure condemned
Saudi military spokesman Al-Maliki called the seizure of the ship Sunday a “terrorist operation” that posed a threat to the freedom of international navigation and world trade.

The conflict in Yemen began in early 2015 when Houthi rebels — a minority Shia group from the north of the country — drove out the internationally-recognized government and forced its president, Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, to flee.

The crisis quickly escalated into a multi-sided war, with neighboring Saudi Arabia leading a coalition of Gulf states against the Houthi rebels. The coalition is advised and supported by the US, among other nations.

A US official told CNN the government of Saudi Arabia had informed the US of the incident and said: “A Saudi-flagged vessel was seized and boarded by armed men while sailing in Yemen’s territorial waters”.

Saudi Arabia and China launched a joint naval exercise dubbed “Blue Sword 2019” at the King Faisal Naval Base on the Red Sea, Saudi Press Agency reported.

According to SPA the Royal Navy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, represented by the Special Forces of the Western Fleet in Jeddah, and its counterpart of the Chinese People’s Navy took part in the exercise.

The drill is scheduled to last three weeks at the King Faisal Naval Base in Jeddah.

The exercise aims at “building mutual trust, enhancing cooperation between the Saudi Royal Navy and the Chinese People’s Navy, and exchanging and developing experiences in the field of maritime terrorism and piracy,” SPA added.

Over the past few months, the number of joint military drills in the region has been on the rise amid fears of possible conflicts.

Iraqi security and pro-Iranian paramilitary forces are shooting into crowds of protesters in a bid to drive them from the centre of Baghdad and end six weeks of demonstrations that have challenged the political system to an extent not seen since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, like reported by counterpunch.org.

Police retook three bridges across the Tigris River that lead to the fortified Green Zone on Saturday and are surrounding Tahrir Square, the central focus of the protests.

In al-Rasheed Street, close to the square, police set fire to tents set up by volunteer doctors to treat injured protesters.

At least six people were killed in the latest clashes, four of them by bullets and two by heavy duty tear gas grenades fired directly at the head or bodies of protesters, according to Amnesty International.

It says that 264 people taking part in demonstrations have died since 1 October, though the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights gives a higher figure of 301 dead and 15,000 injured.

The protests – and the merciless government attempt to stamp them out – are the biggest threat to the power of the Iraqi political establishment since Isis was advancing on Baghdad in 2014. In many respects, the danger to the status quo is greater now because Isis was an existential threat to the Shia majority who had no choice but to support their ruling elite, however predatory and incompetent they had proved in office.

The slaughter of so many demonstrators is similar to the tactics used by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in 2013 to crush protests opposing his military coup that had overthrown the elected government.

By way of contrast, there was no such violence response to street demonstrations in Baghdad in 2016 , when protesters invaded the Green Zone, or in Basra in 2018, when the government and party offices were set ablaze.

Over the last month-and-a-half, however, there has been repeated use of snipers firing at random into demonstrations or targeting local protest leaders. The people doing the killing are parts of of the government’s highly fragmented security services and factions of the paramilitary Hashd al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) known to be aligned with Iran.

It is the Iranian leadership, and more especially General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Revolutionary Guard’s al-Quds force and supremo of Iranian regional policy, who is orchestrating the campaign to smash the protests by sustained use of violence.

Precisely why General Qasem Soleimani decided to do so is a mystery, since the initial demonstration in Tahrir Square on 1 October was small.

The NGOs organising it had been failing for months to generate momentum.

It was the unprecedented “shoot-to-kill” policy of the authorities that turned these ill-attended rallies into a mass movement not far from a general uprising.

During the first days of the protests, protest organisers told The Independent they were at first baffled by what had happened, inclining at first to believe that the the first day’s violence, when at least 10 people were killed, might be a one-off overreaction that would not be repeated.

But the killing of protesters, counter-productive though it might be, went on.

On the day after the first shootings, bands of young protesters, looking very unintimidated, could be seen milling about the area. The authorities escalated the crisis further by declaring a 24-hour curfew and closing down the internet, a collective punishment of all 7 million people in Baghdad that could only spread support for the demonstrators.

At the same time, paramilitary groups, open in their loyalty to Iran, sent their black-clad militants into television stations publicising the protests to wreck their equipment and studios. They assaulted injured demonstrators in hospitals and abducted and threatened journalists, doctors and anybody else backing the demonstrations.

It is unlikely that this was a pre-arranged plot by the pro-Iranian paramilitaries acting on their own initiative.

Several of their leaders, whose groups were subsequently known to have supplied snipers to shoot at the street protests, were interviewed by The Independent a few days earlier.

Though they later declared that they had long detected a deep-laid conspiracy by the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE to use the protests to overthrow the political system in Iraq, they did not say so at the time. Qais al-Khazali, the leader of Asaib Ahl al-Haq, a powerful paramilitary faction, said that “Iran wants a solution [in the US-Iran confrontation] but it cannot say this itself.”

He downplayed the idea that a US-Iran war was on the cards.

Abu Ala al-Walai, the head of Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, said in a separate interview that what most concerned him was an Israeli drone attack on a weapons depot at one of his bases on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Nevertheless, the speed and cohesion with which these pro-Iranian Shia paramilitary groups reacted – or overreacted – to the protests suggests a detailed contingency plan.

“The Iranians always have a plan,” notes one Iraqi commentator.

Nor did the paramilitaries act alone: no distinct boundary line divides the PMF from state security institutions. The PMF may number about 85,000, are paid their salaries by the Iraqi government and the chairman of the PMF is Faleh al-Fayyad, the government’s national security adviser.

The Interior Minister always belongs to the Iran-supported Badr Organisation and the ministry’s Emergency Response Division, for instance, is reported to have provided snipers to shoot protesters.

In the weeks since the first peaceful march was met with extreme violence, the intensity of the repression has escalated in Baghdad and across southern Iraq.

In the Shia holy city of Karbala on one day, snipers killed 18 people and survivors were detained by pop-up checkpoints as they fled through the alleyways.

Kidnapping, disappearances, intimidation – a whole apparatus of repression – has been put in place and is unlikely to be dismantled.

Pro-Iranian pro-status quo individuals and institutions within the Iraqi political system are becoming more dominant.

Critics of the status quo, like the populist nationalist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose coalition is the largest grouping in parliament, have fallen silent.

Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani called last Friday for the security forces to refrain from using “excessive force”, but there is no sign of this having any impact.

Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi prime minister for the last year, has come out of the crisis looking ineffectual.

The Iraqi political class as a whole have evidently decided that they must stamp out the protests to preserve their interests.

The protesters in the streets – the radicalism of whose demands and the their vagueness about how they might be achieved resembles French students during the 1968 events in France – are not able to say what they would put in place of the present corrupt and dysfunctional government. As for those carrying out the repression, they are so steeped in blood that it will be impossible for them to reverse course, not that they show any sign of wanting to do so.

The Turkish army and the pro-jihadist militias that support the offensive launched by Ankara against the Kurds in the north-east of Syria have perpetrated a “soft” ethnic cleansing affecting members of other religious minorities including Christians, like reported by asianews.it.

International activists and NGOs report that the assurances provided by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the US vice-president Mike Pence are in reality largely ignored on the ground.

Amnesty International report that the Turkish military and its Arab allies have shown “a shameful lack of respect for the lives of civilians”. The activists base their claims on the testimony of rescuers, displaced persons and journalists, according to whom “serious violations and war crimes” have taken place including “summary executions and attacks” that “killed or wounded civilians”.

Among those denouncing the abuses of the Turks and their allies is a Syrian Christian politician, responsible for the Syriac National Council. Interviewed by the Catholic News Service (Cns), Bassam Ishak speaks of intimidation and targeted attacks against Armenians and Syriac Christians, who are prevented from accessing the lands and their properties in the disputed territories of the north-east. A serious problem, explains, especially in this period of cotton harvesting, among the main sources of income.

According to Ishak, a member of the Syrian Democratic Council, the pro-Turkish militants would have the order “not to physically touch the Christians”, but are free to expropriate lands and property. Syrian armed groups allied with Ankara “are repeating what has been done in the past to Afrin”, when the Turks invaded the city of northwestern Syria in 2018 with the help of armed gangs and mercenaries.

“In Afrin – Ishak says – they took the crops of the Kurds who lived in the area and now they do the same with the Christians. Ras al-Ayn Christians own at least one third of agricultural land. These forces are conducting a sort of soft ethnic cleansing. Christians are frightened by these gangs, and end up losing their source of income “, so they ask “why should they stay and live under Islamic extremists”.

A Christian doctor of the city speaks of Turkish bombings on the night of the 24th, when the truce should have been in force, which caused “many deaths”. The following day three nurses were shot in Suluk, near Tal Abyad, by Syrian militia allied with Turkey. Their mutilated bodies have been found in the sewer system.

These events, he says, show once more truce violations and abuses committed by Ankara and its allies. Added to this is the video posted on October 21 by the so-called Islam Army that invites its members to treat Christians as “second-class citizens” and force them to pay the jizya, the Islamic tax that minorities must pay to benefit from the protection of Muslims.

As reported by the group Doctors for Human Rights, despite the agreement between Russia and Turkey on 22 October, the situation remains “very harsh” for civilians. Ankara, the activists add, must “immediately stop attacks against the civilians in Syria and respect human rights”.

However, despite the words in the area there are violations of the truce and even in the last hours there has been a return to fighting. Syrian state media reports violent clashes in the border town of Ras al Ain, where Ankara aims to have created a “safe zone”. The town is under the control of forces led by Syrian Kurds, supported by the soldiers of Bashar al-Assad who have been fighting for days with Ankara’s troops.

The Commander of the Iranian Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, attended an Iraqi security meeting instead of Prime Minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, which surprised present officials. Soleimani vowed, according to AP agency, to suppress the demonstrations but failed so far, like reported by shafaaq.com.

AP also confirmed in its report that Iran was losing influence in Iraq and Lebanon because of the failure of its agents to maintain that influence.

Soleimani suppresses the demonstrations

The day after anti-government protests erupted in Iraq, Iranian Gen. Qassim Soleimani flew into Baghdad late at night and took a helicopter to the heavily fortified Green Zone, where he surprised a group of top security officials by chairing a meeting in place of the prime minister.

“We in Iran know how to deal with the protests,” he told Iraqi officials. “This happened in Iran and we took control of it,” according to senior officials familiar with the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The day after Suleimani’s visit, clashes between demonstrators and security forces in Iraq became much more violent, with the death toll rising to 100 after unidentified snipers fired at protesters in the head and chest. About 150 demonstrators were killed in less than a week.

According to the agency, The arrival of Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force and the architect of its regional security apparatus, signaled Tehran’s concern over the protests, which had erupted across the capital and in Iraq’s Shiite heartland, and included calls for Iran to stop meddling in the country.

Soleimani failure

But nearly a month later, the protests in Iraq have resumed and demonstrations continue in Lebanon, both directed at governments and factions allied with Tehran. The protests threaten Iran’s regional influence at a time when it is struggling under crippling U.S. sanctions.

During renewed protests this week, men in black plainclothes and masks stood in front of Iraqi soldiers, facing off with protesters and firing tear gas. Residents said they did not know who they were, with some speculating they were Iranians.

Iran’s influence challenge

The report notes that the protests in Iraq and Lebanon are fueled by local grievances, and are directed mainly at political elites allied with Iran, a challenge to Tehran, which is closely supporting armed militias in each country.

The increasingly violent crackdown in Iraq and the attack by Hezbollah supporters on the main protest camp in the Lebanese capital Beirut have raised fears of a backlash from Iran and its allies against the demonstrations.

For his part, Iraqi security analyst, Hisham al-Hashemi said, “Iran fears these demonstrations, because it made the biggest gains in the government and parliament through the parties close to them since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.”

As Hashemi pointed out “Iran does not want to lose these gains. It has tried to work through its parties to contain the protests in a very Iranian way,” referring to its failure to contain the demonstrations.

Iraqis against Iran’s Influence

According to the report , the protests in Iraq resumed Friday after a brief hiatus, with protesters massing in Baghdad’s Tahrir Square and clashing with security forces as they tried to breach barricades on a bridge leading to the Green Zone, the seat of the government and home to several embassies. In southern Iraq, protesters have attacked and torched the offices of political parties and government-backed militias allied with Iran.

South of Iraq, protesters burned the offices of political parties and militias backed by the Iranian-allied government.

AP also stressed in its report that Iran is losing influence in Iraq and Lebanon because of the failure of its agents to maintain this influence.

Turkey will begin joint military patrols with Russia in northern Syria on Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Wednesday, like reported by dw.com.

The patrols will initially begin within 7 kilometers south of the Turkish border to Syria.

The statement comes a day after the expiration of the 150-hour period agreement for Syrian border guards and Russian military police to remove Kurdish forces 30km from the Turkish border in northeast Syria.

Erdogan on Wednesday disputed the claim by Russian military police that the Kurdish YPG militia, which is allied with the US, had left the strip.

Turkey reserves the right to launch another operation against the YPG in the area, said Erdogan.

Turkey considers the militia, the main component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a terrorist group linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has fought a nearly four-decade war for Kurdish rights against the Turkish state.

In a statement released by the Turkish Ministry of National Defense on Tuesday, the Turkish-Russian patrols “will be initiated in the west and east of the borders of current Operation Peace Spring at a depth of 10 kilometers.”

The joint operations will include mine clearances and reconnaissance activities.