Over the past couple of days Iranian backed Shi’a militia in Iraq, which describe themselves as Islamic Resistance, have attacked the heavily fortified US Embassy in Baghdad in what appears to be an attempt to besiege or occupy it or parts of it. It is important to keep in mind that US Embassy Baghdad is a large and heavily fortified compound. Perhaps the most heavily fortified diplomatic compound that we or anyone else has anywhere. The damage that was done by Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa was largely done to buildings and structures around the perimeter. That doesn’t make the assault on the facility any less frightening or dangerous for the US diplomatic and Interagency personnel that live and work within the fortified embassy.
The Washington Post’s Baghdad Bureau’s Mustafa Salim is now reporting that the assault and attempted siege or occupation is over.
They started to retreat from the US embassy and starting setting up tents in Abu Nawas street which is opposite to the embassy across the river, outside the green zone.
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
Some already retreated and started to set up tents outside the green zone pic.twitter.com/rAlVQ3vX4a
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
Lots of tents are still in the street of the US embassy pic.twitter.com/jTEKycsmjX
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
Those people who are staying are KH and Nujabaa (both classified as terrorist organizations by the United States) they said “we are Islamic resistance not part of PMU, we haven’t received orders from our leaders”
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
KH are leaving the area of the US embassy, with celebration chants and fireworks because they considered it as “victory”
It’s FINALLY over, happy new year everyone. pic.twitter.com/YYaog9vRCd— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
There are two outstanding questions: 1) what happens now? and 2) why did this happen. To answer the first, the quick reaction forces of the 100 Marines that were sent midday yesterday and the initial quick reaction companies from 82nd Airborne Division that were mobilized shortly after that are en route. The 3rd Brigade Combat Team/82nd Airborne Division (3BCT/82ndABN – the Panther Brigade) is the US’s designated rapid reaction brigade, but it is partially deployed to Afghanistan right now, so it is unclear just how much of the BCT is available if they have to deploy an entire brigade combat team. I would also expect the State Department’s Regional Security Officer (RSO) is conducting crisis action and contingency planning, as well as wargaming scenarios with his or her staff, as well as with counterparts from the Department of Defense. I expect that a Non-combatant Evacuation Operation (NEO) contingency plan is being prepared in case the assault on the embassy is restarted.
The second answer is provided by Salim:
Those groups considered the protests as conspiracy act by the United States because it’s threatening the Iranian influence in Iraq, they even described the protesters as “American Joker gangs”
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
They were thousands of people some with weapons and military vehicles, then they headed towards the fortified green zone where the US and other embassies are located. This area is allowed for civilians, only those with special access, but those crowds couldn’t be stopped.
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
They wrote “Solaimani is my leader” and other graffitis and they holding photos of Khamenei. It was thousands of people chanting “death to America and Israel” among the crowd there were senior militia commanders like Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandus, who is classified as terrorist by the US
— Mustafa Salim (@Mustafa_salimb) January 1, 2020
What Salim is reporting is that the Iranian theater leadership decided that the US was responsible for the emerging Iraqi displeasure with the Iraqi government, its ties to Iran, and to Iran’s presence and actions in Iraq. This displeasure also appears to once again be breaking along tribal and sectarian lines. One of the major ongoing problems in Iraq that leads to instability is not just the tribal or sectarian divide, but the divide between the Iraqis that never went into exile and the Iraqis that did and came back. Especially those Iraqi Shi’a that went into exile in Iran, came back, and have been running the government since the US’ Coalition Provisional Authority empowered them to form the majority coalitions in successive governments. I spent almost six months conducting between 40 to 50 interviews with both Sunni and Shi’a tribal and religious leaders (often the same people as many sheikhs are also imams) across central Iraq in the summer and fall of 2008. With the exception of some of the sub-sheiks or sheiks of very small, rural tribes, all of the sheikhs and imams I interviewed, including and often especially the Shi’a ones, made it very clear that they did not like and did not trust the Shi’a political leaders that went into exile in Iran and had been empowered by being given control of the Government of Iraq (GOI). It was during this time that then Prime Minister Maliki, leading a coalition government with a Shi’a majority made up of leaders, like Maliki, who had gone into exile in Iran, began to telegraph that he was going to move against the Sawha (Awakenings movement) and Sons of Iraq (the tribal militias we were training and partnering with). These tensions have never been resolved, have begun to bubble over again, and Iran decided it was a threat to its influence in Iraq and needed to change the narrative. And the collateral damage from the retaliatory air strike this past week provided the Iranians with the opening they needed.
Now we wait to see if cooler heads can and will prevail.
Open thread!
germy
Correction: Any less frightening?
Cheryl Rofer
My big question is how they got into the compound so easily.
I suspect the answer is that, although the US had Marines (snipers?) on the roofs of the buildings, they were ordered not to shoot unless things got really bad.
But it seems to me there should have been other points at which the demonstrators were stopped.
Would like to hear your take on that, Adam.
HinTN
With Trump, this is the standard policy.
J R in WV
Good piece , Adam, but near the end you have people leaving Iraq to shelter in … Iraq.
More specifically “…went into exile in Iraq.”
Yutsano
Oh boy. Let’s peel back the layers of the Iranian onion here. There is of course the Iranian military and then there’s the Revolutionary Guard. It would be interesting if both were involved but it’s usually one or the other. And that’s assuming the RG is in the mood to follow the government or even take over the operation from the military. So who got the back off order from Tehran?
germy
hells littlest angel
A sigh of relief, for now, that history didn’t repeat here. I blanch at imagining the Simpleton-In-Chief dealing with a hostage crisis.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: Fixed. Thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: The US security inside the gates had specific rules of engagement about what they could and could not do. The security outside the gates is supposed to be provided by Iraqi Security Forces. They either stood down or stood around and did nothing. That’s basically what happened.
Adam L Silverman
@J R in WV: Fixed. Thanks.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: It’s Suleimani. He runs the Quds Force within the IRGC and is Iran’s point person/theater commander for what is going on in Iraq and Syria.
Martin
At the other end of security, the California Consumer Privacy Act goes into effect today.
So, it’s somewhat similar to EUs GDPR, but the enforcement mechanism is likely to differ given that the biggest targets of this legislation are California corporations. That the law exists at all shows you how limited regulatory capture is here in CA by the tech firms. And there’s pretty serious disagreement within the tech sector on these matters (Apple, Intel, and most of the hardware revenue companies against Facebook, Google, and most of the software revenue ones).
Adam L Silverman
@germy: The answers in the second tweet are correct.
germy
@Adam L Silverman: Is our education secretary’s brother still doing business there?
Kent
I know nothing about how things work in Iraq. But in other parts of the world, security within the Embassy walls and grounds is responsibility of the Marines and US contractors. Security outside on the streets and surrounding area would be the responsibility of host-country police forces.
germy
debbie
Tangentially on topic, I just finished listening to Howard Stern’s interview with Hillary Clinton. What a strong finish! She’s right. We’ve got a lot of problems. Iraq isn’t even the biggest one.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: And they seem to have gotten past only the Iraqi security forces. Thanks.
debbie
Was there no one in the war room who even brought the possible consequences of Trump’s flexing his dick with this bombing?
AliceBlue
@hells littlest angel: According to Lindsey Graham. the fact that we’re not dealing with a hostage crisis is due to said Simpleton-in-Chief’s extraordinary strength and leadership capabilities.
hells littlest angel
@germy: What exactly did he say? Something like, “I would completely destroy Iran, but I have my good suit on,” I’d guess.
hells littlest angel
@AliceBlue: I can’t think of anyone who manages crises that didn’t actually happen better than the S-in-C.
japa21
@AliceBlue: As I understand it the Marines Adam talked about in his post were part of a rapid response team set up by Obama after the events in Benghazi. So once again, thanks Obama. Personally, I doubt there was ever a threat of a hostage situation. The firepower in that embassy is pretty large.
ETA: If Trump had been aware that Obama had ordered that system set up, he probably would have eliminated it and things may have turned out differently.
debbie
I’m Googling for help on all the acronyms in the tweets. How does KH and PMU relate to the Quds Force?
bemused senior
Since this is tagged as an open thread, I’m wondering if you have seen this article in the WaPo?
artem1s
@germy:
TrumpPutin says he does not want or foresee war with Iran…Adam L Silverman
@germy: Not that I’m aware of. Academi, which used to be Xe, which used to be Blackwater, is owned by a company that also bought up several large, medium, and small defense and intel contractors. But as far as I know Prince has no connection either to this conglomerate or to Academi. The company he runs, Frontier Services, is a front company that is bankrolled by the PRC. Basically Erik Prince works for, is bankrolled by, and is owned by Xi.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Not so much gotten past them as allowed to get past them. What we don’t know yet is whether someone gave the Iraqi Security Forces to let them through or whether the commanders on the ground decided they didn’t want to be in the middle of this fight.
Adam L Silverman
@AliceBlue: We’re not dealing with a hostage crisis because someone high up in the Iraqi government made it clear that this was unacceptable and had to stop. And even then it really wouldn’t have been a hostage crisis so much as a NEO conducted under fire. It would have been less Tehran 1979 and much, much more Saigon 1975.
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: KH is Ktaib Hezbullah, which I wrote out in the narrative parts of my post. It is one of the Iranian run Shi’a militias in Iraq. The overall term for the Shi’a militias in Iraq that the Iraqi government and, by extension, the US led coalition partnered with to fight ISIS are called Popular Mobilization Units, which is abbreviated as PMU. Most of them are under control of the Iraqi government, but a few like Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa are under control of Iran’s Quds Force.
Adam L Silverman
@bemused senior: I have now. Quick take: not surprising at all, though horrific, we basically use prisons and jails and detention centers as places to house “surplus” population that American state and society has decided there is not much use for.
SiubhanDuinne
@debbie: My opinion of Howard Stern as an interviewer went up exponentially* when I watched that, and then another few orders of magnitude** yesterday when Terry Gross aired an excerpt from a “Fresh Air” she did with him earlier this year.
*(I am not a real mathematician.)
**(Obviously.)
Another Scott
Thanks for this.
Something that struck me in an Al Jazeera piece yesterday:
(Emphasis added.)
So, basically, the Iraqi military attacked a US base and killed a US contractor. The US retaliated by attacking the Iraqi military and killing 25 of their guys. But it’s Iran’s fault.
Ok then…
:-/
Seriously, it’s complicated and messy, and we still have no policy there other than occupation forever and always and squeezing Iran in the hopes of creating a casus belli so that the RWNJs can finally get their War on Iran to “take the oil”.
Happy 2020. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
@SiubhanDuinne: He’s always been good. He just sort of vanished a decade ago when he took the big bucks to go on Sirius, which pretty much no one but long distance truckers listens to.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
Thanks. I had missed that Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa hadn’t retreated along with the others and could’t figure out the hierarchy.
Kirk Spencer
@debbie: I know what you meant, but I wish you had chosen another phrase. I don’t know if there’s enough brain bleach in the world for that image in my mind.
wenchacha
New year’s greetings to everyone!
I have been in some sort of holiday limbo since most of last year. My mother, 93, died just after Thanksgiving. Our dad had just been moved in to the same nursing home where she had recently become a full-time resident. My sister has been their live-in caregiver for nearly a decade.
Now, confined to a nursing home, dad is depressed, grumpy, uncooperative. He is almost 94, and says he wants “freedom.” He has had moments of confusion, especially after the two days of funeral events. We have all seen evidence of cognitive changes in him this past year, but this past 2 weeks it has all been accelerated.I
I know this stuff happens, but right now it feels relentless. He will either: get better for a while, then die, or just either away and die. I suspect he prefers sooner than later to exit. All these changes have happened quickly: Mom losing strength and dying, Dad’s inability to handle reality. I don’t know if hospice would allow him to refuse food and water, if he wants to go. Or if it is something he would do.
He only became a resident there in November, and was placed in an area with “personal care” but no skilled care. Since the funeral, he has been moved to skilled care, to prevent more falls.
This is the ultimate Debbie Downer post, aside from 45’s stuff. Dad has been an upstanding citizen his entire life. It is hard to see him be so small and helpless and not in control. He just lost his partner of 73 years. There is not anything I can tell him, aside from loving him.
Kent
@wenchacha: So sorry to hear it. We are a couple stages away from where you are but those days are clearly approaching for my wife’s parents. We spend an enormous fortune on eldercare in this country but the results seem so unsatisfactory. I don’t know what the answer is. Part of what I dislike in this country is how we segregate the ages so much. I’d much rather live where elderly and kids can mix. Our best neighbors of all time were an 80-something couple who lived next door to us in TX and loved keeping an eye on our kids.
trollhattan
@wenchacha:
Does his facility offer music therapy? It could be a way to bring dad out of his depression and isolation. Best wishes, this is a difficult journey for everybody involved and can be quite draining.
Jay
Jay
trollhattan
Has Fox run a “Hillary Benghazis Baghdad” Chyron yet?
Dorothy A. Winsor
@wenchacha:
That’s hard. My experience is that caring for elderly relatives is something you learn to do by doing it, so the knowledge always arrives a little too late. You’re doing good.
Kent
@Jay: I suppose one good side effect of our current security culture with video cameras everywhere is that lots of these little incidents of racism and abuse of power that used to go unchallenged now get exposed. In this instance, the restaurant in question had enough security cameras that they could track this coffee cup frame by frame from the moment the order was placed to the moment the coffee was handed to the police officer and prove he was lying. Otherwise some poor innocent minimum wage employee could have lost their job.
It’s actually funny how many racist old white people get exposed on video today. It’s like the world shifted on them and they don’t quite get it yet.
germy
germy
@Kent:
Or worse. There could have been violence directed at that particular chain.
Mike in NC
This past weekend my wife’s cousin came to visit. He’s a West Point graduate and retired FBI agent. He remarried a couple of years ago. His new wife was born in Iraq, grew up in Lebanon as a Christian, and lived briefly in Iran until the Shah was deposed, when he family came here. Her take on all the mess in the Middle East is obvious: the Sunnis hate the Shiites and vice versa, and always will.
Thank God we have Jared fix things!
germy
Trump Tries To Hide His Golfing With Absurd Southern White House Lie
Trump went golfing while a US embassy was under attack and then lied while calling his private club the Southern White House.
MattF
Somewhat OT. Trump is disoriented.
zhena gogolia
I can’t deal with politics or war today. I’m watching The Rutles on youTube.
trollhattan
@germy:
California has this. Good system IMHO.
zhena gogolia
Oh, but I see Pompeo has canceled his lovely Ukraine trip — because of the situation in Iraq. Yeah, right.
WaterGirl
@bemused senior: Foster Children? We are calling these kids who were rippled from their parents for no go reason FOSTER CHILDREN?
Please excuse me while my head explodes.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@zhena gogolia: If he can’t conduct business on the road, maybe he needs a better email server.
zhena gogolia
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
It probably has more to do with the NYT story about “84 days” than anything else.
WaterGirl
@MattF: OT? I think that has been On Topic since early 2016.
zhena gogolia
@zhena gogolia:
“Bill Murray the K,” lol
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STCu2daZGew
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@zhena gogolia: “All You Need is Cash”, heh.
ETA: I have the DVD.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: The PMU are irregulars under nominal command of the Iraqi Army. Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa are under the control of/local extensions of the Quds Force. Also, the Iraqi Army has two major components. One major component of the Iraqi Army is Kurdish Peshmerga, specifically the Talabani and Talabani allied Pesh (the Barzani Pesh was kept in Iraqi Kurdistan to defend it). The other major component of the Iraqi Army are the Badr Corps. The Badr Corps, which is the military wing/militia of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraqi (ISCI/SIIC depending on who is doing the abbreviating. ISCI/SIIC was founded and is run by the al Hakims, who are Shi’a Iraqis who went into exile in Iran. The Badr Corps was set up, trained, and funded by the IRGC and the Quds Force. It is an Iranian irregular military proxy. The Badr commanders who are now Iraqi Army generals still receive pensions from the Iranians.
As I’ve written here before, by teaching the Iraqi Army how to fight like we do, especially in regard to counterinsurgency, we basically taught the Iranian special forces and Iranian Army our tactics, techniques, and procedures. This is one of the reasons that the Iranians are confident that their strategy for defeating a US invasion will be successful: because we’ve been teaching them, through teaching one of their primary proxies, how we would conduct these operations for going on fifteen years.
Adam L Silverman
@wenchacha: Hang in there. We’ll keep good thoughts.
Lapassionara
@wenchacha: You have my sympathies. These kinds issues are so challenging and there are rarely good answers, just less bad ones.
Adam L Silverman
@germy: He tried to go golfing. Someone was able to get him back to Mar a Lago after only 52 minutes at his golf club. So he tried to play golf, didn’t get more than a few holes in at best.
debbie
@MattF:
I don’t dispute the mental unfitness, but his grandfather did emigrate from Germany.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Adam L Silverman: Everybody knows it only counts as golfing if you get 18 holes in. //
Ladyraxterinok
Ot—Many endangered animals have died in a fire in n the ape house at the zoo in Krefeld Germany. Early Jan 1. Info from English language video from German source on youtube
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie: This is true, but Trump was talking about his father, not his grandfather.
Kamala.Harris.2020
Since open thread:
Anyone know anything about “the Good Party”? I have received several emails and they seem to be some sort of “centrist/both sides suck” organization but I can’t find any info about founders, funders, etc?
debbie
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
Right, but the article should have pointed that out. Instead, it made it appear as if Trump had just arbitrarily picked Germany out of all the countries in the world.
Jim
Oh dear , as the spotlight is off the Orange Psycho , what will he say/do to get back into the spotlight ?
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie: Well he’s talking about his father(who was born in NYC):
Kamala.Harris.2020
And then there’s this: https://lawandcrime.com/impeachment/rudys-shiny-new-year/
Kent
@trollhattan: As does Washington. My daughter pre-registered to vote when she got her drivers license.
Steeplejack (phone)
@MattF:
Article from April 2019. I believe there is fresher material available.
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack (phone):
Yeah, just look at Tom Joseph’s twitter feed. He’s a little overwrought, but if you take it with a grain of salt it’s interesting.
jeffreyw
The Democratic Party is the only good party. All others are bad parties. I have spoken.
Baud
@Kamala.Harris.2020:
Isn’t that a spinoff of The Good Wife?
As in “We are centrists and both sides suck because they are extreme” or “We are leftists, and both sides suck because they are right-wing”?
Kent
Are there really any secrets in the military world when it comes to strategy and tactics? I ask this as a non-military person. But really, isn’t a lot of this stuff common knowledge in higher military circles and governed by force structure and equipment (whether you have air power, for example).
I would expect the Iranians to be studying every force in the region from Israel and Turkey in the west to Pakistan, India and China in the east. But I guess what might be different here is that we are actually training a lot of them which makes it easier.
Kamala.Harris.2020
@jeffreyw:
I agree — I am just trying to suss out what kind of operation this is. I assume it is a right-wing funded noise machine that will try to depress turnout or something …
Frankensteinbeck
So if I’m reading this right, it was basically a giant PR stunt? “Look at us thumb our noses at the US and prove the Iraqi government won’t stand against us”? I suppose that is important to insurgent groups, for whom recruiting is everything.
Adam L Silverman
@Kent: There are secrets. For instance, I’m actually an 11 year old girl named Mirabel typing from a secret troll farm situated below the Mongolian steppe and disguised to look like an abandoned yurt.//
More seriously, there are still secrets. And while FM 3-24 was not classified, the tactics, techniques, and procedures we have been and still are teaching are a lot easier to steal, incorporate, reverse engineer, and/or counter plan against. And that’s the problem here.
Adam L Silverman
@Frankensteinbeck: Not PR. Weaponization of information to achieve influence. It was a PSYOP.
Steeplejack (phone)
@zhena gogolia:
Thanks for that tip. Another source (@TomJChicago) to keep my rage gland exercised.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
I know a man who got caught up in the 3 strike law. He spent 27 yrs in CA state prison for 3 counts of misdemeanor petty theft. Half his life in jail for being poor. It’s worse in other states.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: There’s an entire set of criminological theories about this. They are, for obvious reasons, from within the critical theory part of the discipline.
Citizen Alan
@bemused senior:
As horrible as that is, in Republican utopia it will be a 100 times worse as the end of abortion rights will result in hundreds of thousands of unwanted children ending up in facilities like that. But t’m sure the for-profit entity that ends of running them will be humane and Christian and won’t cut corners or anything to maximize profits. I’ imagine Betsy DE vos will end up running it.
StringOnAStick
Very interesting, thanks as always, Adam.
Ruckus
@wenchacha:
So very sorry that you are going through this.
The reality is harsh. The losses are real and come daily. Few of us have learned how to live with this and then usually only as a very concerned secondary observer because we can’t fathom what they are actually going through. We can see it and know what it is, but we have little to no constructive frame of personal reference. We create a life, and it can be great when it is full of people we love, but the loss can be catastrophic enough when our coping mechanisms are normal, but when we’ve lost those, the loss of someone and/or loss of freedom or even just day to day stuff becomes overwhelming. And really not much can help that. Because we know that we are losing bits and pieces of both the outside world and our inside world every day and there is nothing we can do about that. Love him and support him.
Ruckus
@Adam L Silverman:
Oh and BTW that critical theory part? Most of that is bullshit.
Adam L Silverman
@Ruckus: Actually it is quite interesting. The criticalists, like Marx himself who they root themselves in, are very good diagnosticians. There prescriptions for how to fix the problem are the problem.
Ken_L
Can we please stop using the expression ‘Iranian backed militias’ unless there is some contextual reason requiring its use? It’s become a stale bit of media jargon like ‘elite Republican Guard’ and ‘oil-rich city of Kirkuk’. Journalists don’t constantly report on the activities of ‘American backed militias’ or ‘Russian backed militias’. Denying Iraqis agency by implying they are mindless tools of Tehran simply feeds into Trump’s narrative that the Middle East is a straightforward morality tale of America v the evil ayatollahs.
Mike in Pasadena
Parmenides
@Ken_L: Its not that they are mindless drones of the Iranians but they do likely receive funding and support from the Iranians. The command and control is probably not total but is there in respect to larger strategy and with some tactics.
Iran supplies proxy forces for external regime support, force projection, and deniability. Calling them Iranian backed is useful to know something about them.
Kamala.Harris.2020
@Baud:
That’s what I am trying to figure out. Their emails and website are vague, to say the least.
Another Scott
@Kamala.Harris.2020:
It seems to be a vanity project and app from a serial entrepreneur.
https://farhadmohit.com/
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Adam L Silverman
@Ken_L: Because in this case Ktaib Hezbullah and Nujabaa are under the command and control of the Iranians. That’s why they are referred to as Iranian backed. Just as the Badr Corps is Iranian backed. Including the Badr Corps’ personnel we turned into the Iraqi Army. Same with the leadership of the Badr Corps’ parent organization ISCI, as well as the Dawa Party.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Iraqis. I’ve spent a lot of time working on this problem set for the Army, DOD, and Interagency over the past 12 years. I offered to go back again just last month. I’m not pulling these terms out of my tuchas.