Could estranged Iran and the United States let bygones be bygones and come together to rescue Iraq, which is reeling under a ferocious assault by Sunni terrorists from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)? Emergency is the mother of unlikely alliances in world history. The contingency in Iraq, where ISIL has occupied western and central chunks of the country and intends to advance further south to Baghdad “to invade the Shia in their homes”, could be the tipping point for Tehran and Washington to open a tantalising chapter of strategic coordination.
ISIL, whose fundamentalist Sunni ideology is so sadistic that even Al Qaeda has dissociated itself from it, is grabbing parts of Iraq as bases from which terror can be externalised to rip apart the entire West Asian security system. It poses a serious enough threat for Iran and the US to put behind 35 years of mutual hostility.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani says he “can think about” cooperating with the US, provided the latter “starts confronting the terrorist groups in Iraq and elsewhere.” From the Iranian perspective (also shared by the embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki), the US and its Sunni Persian Gulf allies like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar are responsible for creating the monster of ISIL and unleashing it in Syria and Iraq.
Mr Rouhani’s bitter remark that “we had warned everyone, including the West, about the danger of backing such a terrorist and reckless group” is both a critique of where America and its partners erred in the past, and an invitation to the US to rethink the horses it has been backing in the region. A research paper by journalist Elizabeth Dickinson for the Brookings Institution, titled Playing With Fire, shows that hundreds of millions of dollars have been raised in the Gulf monarchies as seed capital for Sunni jihadists, including ISIL, with the goal of overthrowing Syria’s Alawite (a Shia sect) ruling class.
The same jihadists are now operating seamlessly on both sides of the Syria-Iraq border with the aim of toppling both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki and establishing a unified Islamic Emirate that will suppress the “Safavid influence” (reference to the medieval Persian empire that converted its Sunni subjects to Shia Islam). Videos of Sunni youth in the Iraqi city of Mosul stoning armoured vehicles carrying the fleeing Shia Iraqi Army and welcoming ISIL guerrillas into town as liberators feed into the sectarian venom being nurtured by ISIL and its benefactors in the Gulf monarchies.
ISIL and its affiliated jihadist forces visualise a forcible reunification of all Islamic land across the region under Sunni domination, a prospect that is frightening for the national interests of both the US and Iran. Ben Hubbard of the New York Times interviewed numerous jihadists flooding into Syria to wage war and reported how most were motivated by a will “to erase the region’s borders, found an Islamic state, impose Sharia law” and to “replace the countries created by colonial powers” with a Sunni Caliphate.
Not even Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, the benefactors of ISIL and other Sunni jihadist outfits waging insurgencies in Syria and Iraq, would welcome an Islamic superstate that supplants the nation state system in West Asia. But the genie is out of the bottle and it is wreaking havoc.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has expressed alarm that ISIL invaders in Iraq are conducting summary executions, kidnappings and arbitrary detentions. Gruesome videos claiming mass shootings of 1,700 Shia Iraqi soldiers by ISIL have shocked the world’s conscience. ISIL has also announced new diktats in the occupied Iraqi governorate of Nineveh that order destruction of Shia shrines and imposition of modesty codes on women, who have been ordered to “only go outside the house if necessary.”
ISIL’s stunning military inroads in Iraq’s heavily Sunni populated governorates of Anbar, Diyala, Salahuddin and Nineveh have been enabled by the incompetence of the US-trained Iraqi Army and the biased anti-Sunni state apparatus crafted by Prime Minister Maliki since he first won elections in 2006. The overtly sectarian security policies that Mr Maliki adopted against Iraq’s Sunnis have alienated them and sown mass discontent among minorities that ISIL has exploited.
But the bigotry with which ISIL is implementing its diabolical version of Sunni Islam means that it is a far bigger threat to regional and international peace than Mr Maliki’s Shia majoritarianism in Iraq or Mr Assad’s Shia minority rule in Syria. This distinction between the impact of Sunni and Shia hardliners is seminal for Iran and the US to partner. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Washington has established a false equivalence between Shia extremism (manifested in the Iran-backed Lebanese militant movement, Hezbollah) and the much broader Sunni terrorism.
As American foreign policy in West Asia has been driven for decades by solicitousness for Israel’s security interests, Iran and Hezbollah have been blacklisted as pariahs comparable with Sunni terrorists of Al Qaeda, Hamas and other such organisations. However, the Shia militant outfits have limited goals. Since the majority of Arabs are Sunnis, there is no chance for Shia extremism to metastasise and take over the whole region. On the other hand, ISIL and Al Qaeda’s remnants could achieve total dominion if left unchecked.
The spectre of a Salafi or Takfiri (radical Sunni streams of thought) super state is sufficiently scary for Iran and the United States to rediscover that they have a common foe and have to combine forces.
American scholar Charles Kupchan argues that an enemy can turn into a friend in international politics when a state realises that it “confronts multiple threats and seeks to remove one of the sources of insecurity” by befriending an adversary.
When Adolf Hitler shook the balance of power and the nation state system in Europe, the liberal democratic United States and the United Kingdom had to make the Communist Soviet Union its uneasy bedfellow.
ISIL and the variants of Al Qaeda are today impinging on the regional security framework of the entire West Asia region. Keeping Iran out of the solutions box and excluding it from multilateral initiatives is no longer a viable or smart strategy for America. Only a US-Iran tag team can redeem Iraq and Syria from the marauding jihadists.
The writer is a
professor and dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs
