After more than a decade of active animosity, relations between Iraq and certain GCC member states have been warming up. However, Iran will resist an inter-Arab rapprochement at the expense of its own interest. Tehran has invested heavily in the coming to power of a friendly Iraqi Shiite administration. Isolated in the Middle East and facing active hostility from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Iran will do everything it can to sabotage normalization between Iraq and its Arab neighbors. It is a zero-sum game in which any gain by Saudi Arabia and its allies is a loss for Tehran.

What is Baghdad's room for maneuver in this context of regional intrigues? How can it maintain normal relations with its neighbors to the south without affronting Iran and incurring its wrath or at least its meddling? As an old civilization and a modern state whose project remains unfinished, Iraq in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had a tumultuous history. Shaped by the colonial order that defeated the Ottoman Empire in the Great War (1914-18), the fate of Iraq was sealed with the Sykes-Picot agreement (1916), which "established artificial borders which failed to reflect the demographic, cultural and social identity of the varied communities that had lived for centuries under Ottoman suzerainty."¹

Since the 1920s, the territory that would later become Iraq has suffered political and military disorder and repression, resulting in thousands of deaths.² Although the domination of foreign powers — especially the British and later the Americans — lasted for decades, the Arab character of Iraq has never been questioned. But, with the exception of the years following the U.S. invasion in March 2003, the Iraqi government has always been controlled by the Sunni sect. The invasion ended Sunni rule over Iraq's politico-military apparatus and handed power to the Shia majority, which had been excluded from power. This change of regime plunged Iraq into chaos and a civil war, spawning al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and waves of terrorist attacks. Change has also propagated dissent among Shia groups and the intervention of regional powers in Iraq's internal affairs.

IRAN'S ROLE IN IRAQ

The most valuable lesson that Iran learned from the eight years of war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein is never to allow the emergence of a strong country on its western border. Tehran needs a weak and friendly Iraq, a kind of backyard. To achieve this objective, Iran apparently intends to consolidate and deepen its influence in Iraq by intervening in its political, economic and security affairs.

Iraqi Shia, Iraqi Kurds

Iran has direct and significant influence over two of Iraq's four major political groups — the Shia and the Kurds — and uses its leverage when necessary. There are several Shia and Kurdish parties in which Iran has invested significant money and resources.³ Iranian influence is more evident in the military arena. The Qods Force, a special branch of Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), responsible for extraterritorial operations, has created Shia Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) in Iraq (al-Hashd al-Shaabi) and Syria. They have received arms, training and financing from Tehran and are used in proxy wars that the Qods Force is waging in the region. This paramilitary militia has been created on the model of the Bassij,⁴ a multipurpose militia attached to the IRGC land force, numbering in the thousands, and often called out into the streets at times of crisis to control neighborhoods and repress groups hostile to the Islamic regime. The Qods Forces, numbering in the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shia, confronts the helpless and anxious Sunnis. While not all PMF units have Shia fighters or are under the influence of the Qods, it uses many PMF units to promote an Islamic system for Iraq and the full authority of Iran's Khamenei, whom they consider the leader of the Islamic world.⁵