Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Iraq: Who’s raveling now?

Here is a comment delivered by a St. Bernard from the high peaks of Colorado: By Matthew Valkovic Best Defense chief Alpine sports and sectarianism correspondent David Ignatius’ recent column about Iran in Iraq was quite interesting to read. This little nugget especially stood out for me: "For the Iranians, maintaining a compliant government in ...

ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images
ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images
ALI YUSSEF/AFP/Getty Images

Here is a comment delivered by a St. Bernard from the high peaks of Colorado:

Here is a comment delivered by a St. Bernard from the high peaks of Colorado:

By Matthew Valkovic
Best Defense
chief Alpine sports and sectarianism correspondent

David Ignatius’ recent column about Iran in Iraq was quite interesting to read. This little nugget especially stood out for me:

"For the Iranians, maintaining a compliant government in Baghdad is a crucial matter of national security, especially for the generation that survived the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. Tehran is still settling scores for that conflict. According to U.S. intelligence reports, the Iranians two months ago circulated a list of 600 Iraqi officers who are targeted for assassination because of their role in the Iraq-Iran war. Asked what the United States was doing to counter these killings, a commander responded: ‘We notify people who are on the list.’"

What’s ironic about this list is that my old Iraqi army civil affairs and media officer counterpart (yes, they have them in the ISF — mainly through our advisory efforts), who happens to be a Sunni, showed my civil affairs and PSYOP team and me a similar list around June/July of last year, if I recall correctly.

My counterpart’s list, however, was of Shia Iraqi army officers and soldiers who worked for the Iranian Quds Force in Iraq. He didn’t say if the Shia officers were being "targeted" or not but did suggest that senior Sunni Iraqi army officers certainly knew who they were and who they worked for.

Many of the officers on that list, my counterpart pointed out, were Iraqi army battalion intelligence officers assigned to mainly Shia neighborhoods in Baghdad. "Ahh, look, here’s captain so-and-so from 2nd battalion," my counterpart would say, pointing to the list typed in Arabic script. The senior NCO in our partnered IA brigade’s S-2 shop was also on this list — and his office was just down the hall from my counterpart’s! So that Sunni-Shia fault we straddled in Kadhimiya . . . . yeah, it was also running through our partnered IA brigade’s own building.

Thomas E. Ricks covered the U.S. military from 1991 to 2008 for the Wall Street Journal and then the Washington Post. He can be reached at ricksblogcomment@gmail.com. Twitter: @tomricks1

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