"Iraq Official Says Iran's Military Mastermind Is In Charge"

Iraq Official Says Iran's Military Mastermind Is In Charge


by Armin Rosen at Business Insider

http://www.businessinsider.com/qassem-suleimani-running-iraq-2014-6

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Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Qods Force, the foreign arm of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, is leading the Iraqi reaction to a radical Islamist group's takeover of much of the country, according to a senior Iraqi official quoted by The Guardian.

"Who do you think is running the war? Those three senior generals who ran away?" the unnamed official asked The Guardian's Martin Chulov. "Qassem Suleimani is in charge. And reporting directly to him are the militias, led by Asa'ib ahl al-Haq."

Asaib ahl al-Haq (AAH) organization is one of several Iraqi groups that serve as instruments of Iranian policy through the region, as University of Maryland researcher Philip Smyth explained in a policy brief for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy earlier this week.

Specifically, it is a Shiite militia and Iranian proxy in Iraq that deployed fighters to the Syrian theater to support the regime of Bashar Assad. But Smyth writes that AAH fighters have now been recalled to Iraq to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), the al-Qaeda castoff that took over vast stretches of the country's oil-producing north last week.


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