Whose Man in Baghdad?

Iran's influence in Iraq begins with the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (formerly known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, which changed its name last year) and its armed wing, the paramilitary Badr Corps. Today ISCI operates a well-oiled political and military machine: it is the cornerstone of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki's government, dominates much of the army and the police, controls the holy city of Najaf and holds the governorships and the provincial councils in most of Iraq's southern provinces.

Before, during and after the US invasion of Iraq, SCIRI's ties to Iran were well-known to US officials. But the Bush Administration--relying on the advice of exiled leader of the Iraqi National Congress and neocon poster boy Ahmad Chalabi that postinvasion Iraq would be a secular democracy that would welcome US forces--chose to ignore the Iranian connection. Created in 1982 by Iranian intelligence at the start of the Iran-Iraq war, SCIRI was led by two brothers, Mohammed Baqr al-Hakim and Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim; the latter is now ISCI's chief. The construction of SCIRI under the Hakims was overseen by Ali Khamenei, then Iran's president and now its supreme leader. The Hakims forcibly recruited Iraqi POWs at camps in Iran to create the Badr Corps, which was controlled by Iranian military and intelligence services. It was known as the IRGC's Ninth Badr Corps.

After the 2003 US invasion, amid the chaos and looting that followed the collapse of Saddam's regime, SCIRI and Badr forces flooded across the Iranian border into Iraq. "Border control was nonexistent," says Wayne White, who in 2003 headed the Iraq team at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. "The Iranians could just drive across.... They would come in convoys, ten trucks at a time." Ali Allawi, a postwar Iraqi defense minister and author of The Occupation of Iraq, wrote, "About 10,000 trained and disciplined Badr fighters entered Iraq, either unarmed or armed only with light weapons, and reassembled in various towns and cities as the fighting arm of SCIRI." (Other estimates involve significantly higher numbers.) Lavishly financed by Iran, SCIRI and Badr installed their leaders within days in ad hoc posts in Baquba, Kut and other key junctions in the south. Wary of Iran, but seeing little alternative to the turban-wearing clerics of SCIRI and Badr, US and British occupation authorities put the party's officials into top positions. From the early, US-selected Iraqi Governing Council in 2003 onward, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim was named to a succession of key leadership posts, and top SCIRI officials were installed in various ministries, the police and the army. In the Shiite-dominated south SCIRI officials were named to run provincial authorities, cities and towns. They were viewed by the United States and Britain as natural allies in the struggle against remnants of the Baath Party and the burgeoning Sunni resistance--precisely the forces that Iran, too, saw as its deadliest foes.

Virtually en masse, Badr officers were recruited to the fledgling Iraqi police and army that were being assembled by the United States. According to Raed Jarrar, the Iraq consultant for the American Friends Service Committee, Badr officers maintained their same ranks when they were inducted into the Iraqi security forces. A particularly nasty part of Badr's work in Iraq from 2003 to the present has been the operation of death squads. Often, such units were run directly by Iraq's Interior Ministry, whose Badr-controlled police were blamed for assassinating hundreds of former government officials, ex-military and intelligence officers, and civilian professionals, according to widespread media reports. "I was told in the summer of 2003 in Tehran that the change in regime in Baghdad had allowed Iranian intelligence to identify every single individual who had worked in the Iran section of the Iraqi intelligence service," says Mahan Abedin, director of research at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism in London. "They were able to get as much detail as possible about their person, their movement, their connections, their mobile number. All that information was collected." They were eradicated, Abedin says, in a "hidden war."

"Right after the fall of Saddam, [the United States] went looking for the Iraqi intelligence operatives whose target was Iran," says Judith Yaphe, a former CIA Iraq specialist. "If you're Iran, or very pro-Iranian, you're not going to like those guys, are you? We wanted to use them, and Iran wanted to get rid of them. And there's only one way to get rid of them." Anxious not to allow the United States to make common cause with these operatives, Tehran used its muscle to wipe them out.

Evidence of direct Iranian involvement in ISCI-linked death squads is hard to come by. Certainly, ties between ISCI and Iran's Revolutionary Guard are ongoing. As recently as December 2006, two leaders of the secret Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard were seized by US forces inside the Baghdad compound of Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, in the home of Hadi al-Ameri, the ISCI official who is the commander of the Badr Corps. And US military leaders in Iraq recognize ISCI's Iranian connections. "I think we're all pretty well aware of the potential ties there," says a senior US military officer in Baghdad. But, he says, as long as the Badr militia isn't shooting at Americans, the party's ties to Iran will be tolerated.

The United States has also shown its willingness to tolerate ISCI's record of horrific abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture and illegal prisons. "The U.S. reportedly has evidence implicating SCIRI members in death squad activity, but has been reluctant to use it," says a November 2007 report by the International Crisis Group (ICG), citing US military sources.

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