Iran fills key role in battling Islamic State in Iraq
In an isolated corner of northeastern Iraq, a foreign power has been a crucial contributor in a little-noticed front against the militant Islamic State and it's not the United States.
At his office here, Mala Bakhtiar, military supervisor of the Kurdish peshmerga forces and a local politician, spoke openly of comprehensive Iranian involvement in logistics, intelligence-sharing and provision of military equipment to Kurdish troops.
"They gave us rockets, cannons, maps," a grateful Bakhtiar said of the Iranians, gesturing at the large-scale maps competing for wall space. "We needed these things badly."
The Kurdish leader also confirmed the presence of consultants from the Pasdaran, also known as the Revolutionary Guard who, he said, "were very helpful" as advisors in the ongoing battle to dislodge the Sunni extremists from the nearby strategic town of Jalawla and vicinity.
U.S. officials are loath to acknowledge that they are on the same side of the Iraqi battlefield as Shiite Muslim-dominated Iran, Washington's 35-year adversary and the archenemy of a pair of staunch U.S. allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Iran, which shares a 1,000-mile border with Iraq, has pointedly not been asked to join the new global alliance the Obama administration is building to counter Islamic State. And Secretary of State John F. Kerry has declared that Iran's presence "would not be appropriate" at a global security conference set to begin Monday in Paris.
But denial cannot trump reality on the ground in Shiite-run Iraq, where Iran is indisputably a major player. Tehran was already a formidable presence before the first U.S. airstrikes targeting Sunni militant positions in northern Iraq last month. It was Iranian-backed Shiite militias that helped the ill-prepared Iraqi military thwart the extremists' rampage toward Baghdad in June and July, blunting the militants' advance.
Iran has moved quickly to assist both the Iraqi military and Kurdish peshmerga here in the north.
"We resorted to any group that would help," the avuncular, mustachioed Bakhtiar explained.
"Iraq is now a stage for intervention from all countries of the world," added Bakhtiar, also a leading figure with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of the two major political parties in Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region.