In January 2020, a military strike by the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, then deputy head of an Iraqi paramilitary organization known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU).

The assassination increased not only the escalation between the U.S. and Iran-linked Shiite militias, but it also enabled the Iraqi parliament to request then Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to end foreign military presence in Iraq. Correspondingly, Shiite militias carried out a total of nearly 100 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases hosting  U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq, compelling the U.S. to reconsider its combat mission in Iraq.

At first, the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases forced the U.S. to downsize its military mission in Iraq. Accordingly, the U.S. withdrew approximately half of its 5,000 forces from Iraq in 2020. The majority of the remaining forces serve as advisers to Iraq’s military. The U.S.-led coalition handed over eight bases to the Iraqi military last year and pulled international troops back to larger garrisons such as Camp Taji, Erbil, and Ain al-Asad airbases.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has been facing pressure from Iraqi Shia factions in the country and militias allied with Iran to implement the Iraqi parliament’s nonbinding decision to end foreign military presence in Iraq. Al-Kadhimi has strived to reduce coalition combat forces, and instead to increase NATO’s role in Iraq, where in 2018 he invited some 500 NATO personnel to raise Iraqi military and security competencies during Iraq’s strategic dialogue with the U.S.

The U.S. withdrawal of combat missions from Iraq will not stop drone and rocket attacks by the Shiite militias on U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases hosting the U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq.

On the one hand, the strategic dialogue meetings have resulted in reducing the U.S.-led combat mission against DAESH in Iraq, the majority of whom are American soldiers, by 60 percent. On the other hand, NATO agreed to expand its military consultation mission in Iraq to roughly 4,000 troops.

Moreover, Josep Borrell, high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy and vice-president of the European Commission, announced that NATO is planning to establish a second base for training missions in Erbil. Thus, the U.S. has shared the responsibility to respond to attacks from Iran-linked Shiite militias with its allies in NATO.

Iraq has often been likened to a mafia state and a kleptocracy. It has the semblance of democracy through fairly regular elections, and the trappings of a judiciary and security forces serving the interests of the nation by “fighting terrorism” and “ensuring justice is served”, as Iraqi politicians often like to pontificate in an attempt to polish their credentials as public servants.

In reality, however, Iraq has become the playground for Iran-sponsored Shia jihadist groups and militias who control every kind of industry imaginable, from a Shia clergy-backed illicit sex trade that sells girls as young as 9-years-old, to a drug trafficking cartel that controls Iraq’s porous borders with Iran and smuggles copious amounts of narcotics.

Regular Iraqis who have had their lives upended by the incessant criminality and who have had their hopes for a bright future dashed by these gangs and terrorist organizations know that Iran’s insidious influence is responsible. Although they have come out in protest several times, such open dissent is often extremely deadly, with activists facing assassination and worse.

A recent spate of political assassinations

This month alone, several well-known activists and political dissidents have been killed, with the state either complicit in the slayings or else powerless to prevent these powerful militias from murdering the Iraqi citizens it is supposed to protect.

In the first week of May, Ihab al-Wazni, a leader of the protest movements in Karbala, was gunned down outside his home. Surveillance footage showed several masked men on motorcycles close in on Wazni before strafing him in a hail of gunfire, killing him on the scene.

The militants had finally killed the prolific activist, himself a Shia Arab, after attempting to do so in December 2019 just after the most recent protest movement first began in earnest. Wazni narrowly escaped an attempt on his life which tragically led to the death of his friend and co-organiser Fahem al-Tai. Wazni was dropping Tai off at his home, also in Karbala, when again masked gunmen opened fire leading to Wazni barely escaping death while Tai was not so fortunate and was killed outside his home.

The assassination of Wazni was followed 24 hours later with the attempted murder of journalist Ahmad Hassan who was shot in the head as he arrived home in Diwaniyah. Hassan has undergone brain surgery and remains in critical condition at a Baghdad hospital with his family fearing further retaliation against him and them due to his criticism of the authorities and militia violence against unarmed demonstrators.

Over the weekend, a candidate in the upcoming elections was also assassinated, again by suspected Iran-backed militants. Hashem al-Mashhadani, a Sunni candidate in Baghdad for the Azm Coalition led by businessman Khamis al-Khanjar, was killed last Saturday less than five months before elections are due to take place. Khanjar described the assassination as “a dangerous message” designed to undermine the democratic process by putting candidates in fear of their lives.

These assassinations and murders have led Al-Beit Al-Watani, or the National House bloc, a political group which emerged out of the protest movement, to boycott the elections set to take place in October this year. The party has demanded that the killers responsible be brought to justice before the electoral process can be taken seriously. Obviously, this is not a controversial position for them to adopt, particularly considering the last election in 2018 attracted an embarrassing 44.5 percent turnout, placing enormous doubts on the credibility of Iraq’s democratic process.

Shia jihadism undermines democracy

It is no secret that Karbala, Diwaniyah, Baghdad, and all major Iraqi cities are crawling with pro-Iran Shia militants. While the protest movements in Iraq were primarily Sunni-led until the rise of the Daesh terror group in 2014 (itself a consequence of sectarian Shia Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s violent suppression of protests), since Daesh’s defeat and the recapture of Mosul in 2017, most demonstrations have been led by the Shia.

The authorities in Baghdad blamed all of Iraq’s economic, security, and political woes on Sunni terrorist organizations, including Al-Qaeda, but after they declared victory in 2017, the common Iraqi Shia began to lose patience with the government for its total lack of services, corruption, and its subservience to Tehran’s interests and diktats. This ultimately led to a number of crises, including the total poisoning of Basra’s water supply due to systemic negligence, continued electricity shortages despite Iraq’s massive energy wealth, and rampant corruption that has drained Iraq of at least $150 billion since 2003, destroyed the economy, and the people’s hopes for a brighter future.

Realizing that the problems faced by the country could not solely be attributed to terrorist organisations, and having finally felt fed up of the government blaming everyone but the corrupt politicians who serve the national interests of Iran rather than Iraq, the Shia Arabs took to the streets in heretofore unheard of mass demonstrations in the Shia-dominant south.

These protesters knew who to blame. Aside from torching the offices of several Shia Islamist parties, the demonstrators have repeatedly set fire to diplomatic buildings including consulates belonging to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anti-Iran sentiment is at the highest it has been likely since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, a war in which many Shia Iraqis gave their lives to prevent Iraq from being occupied by Iranian forces after Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, ordered an invasion of their country in 1982.

What this demonstrates is that there is now a new kind of Iraqi nationalism forming, and it is a nationalism that is largely based on opposition to corruption engendered by malignant Iranian interference. By trampling over human rights, the rule of law, and the rights of Iraqi citizens to live with dignity and economic opportunity, Iran and its Shia proxies have inadvertently created perhaps their worst enemy yet. Rather than that enemy being a terrorist organization, it is instead the Iraqi people themselves and, as such, it is only a matter of time before they topple the corrupt state that has made their lives a living misery since 2003.

Throughout February, the Saudi Arabian-owned and UAE-based Al Arabiya channel aired two interviews with Raghad Saddam Hussein. For those who think her name sounds familiar, that is because she is the daughter of the late and deposed Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq from 1979 until an illegal US-led invasion toppled him and his Ba’athist regime in 2003, allegedly on a mission to bring democracy to Iraq and to disarm its weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).

Of course, both democracy in Iraq and any functioning WMD programme turned out to be not only illusory, but an outright lie. Iraq’s governance is now at the mercy of a number of corrupt political elites, many of whom owe their allegiances and careers to neighbouring Iran’s support.

So why are these politicians so afraid of what a dead dictator’s daughter might have to say?

Whereas it would previously take several dollars to equal a single dinar, in the modern day it now takes thousands of dinars to make a single dollar, with current prices currently at $1,458 to the dinar. The Iraqi economy is in appalling shape, with a bloated public sector, very little foreign investment, and a corrupt system that awards large contracts to ethically compromised businessmen who have ties to politicians who enjoy substantial kickbacks.

Raghad’s appearance on a regional pan-Arab broadcaster has caused a massive debate in Iraq.

After being almost totally eradicated, illiteracy has made a resurgent comeback with almost 10 percent of the country over the age of 15 unable to read and write, with gender inequality surging and causing female illiteracy to be almost double that of their male counterparts, according to UNESCO. Meanwhile, Iraqis who are literate, have achieved academically, and who are trying to teach the future generations of their nation are commonly targeted for assassination, leading to a brain drain.

Raghad’s appearance on a regional pan-Arab broadcaster has caused a massive debate in Iraq, with some feeling nostalgic for the days when, despite living under a brutal dictator, Iraqis still had equal access to education, physical security to go about their business, and public services that, while not ideal under a sanctions regime, still blows almost anything the modern Iraqi government offers today out of the water.

Rather than respond with reforms, the Iraqi authorities deployed their security forces, killing more than 600 civilians. They were aided by Shia jihadist militias, all loyal to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and who protect and support Tehran’s agenda of control over Iraq.

Protests against the failed political system that seemingly only serves the interests of the US and Iran have been taking place for more than a decade in Iraq.

Protests against the failed political system that seemingly only serves the interests of the US and Iran have been taking place for more than a decade, with repeated Sunni-led demonstrations meeting heavy crackdowns and deadly violence. The last such attempt was savagely ended by sectarian Shia Islamist Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a well-known Iranian stooge, who ordered the army into the protest camps in 2013 and opened the door to armed violence which ultimately led to Daesh’s conquest of a third of the country.

While previous Shia-led governments could easily smear Sunni protesters as being sympathisers of either the Ba’athists, Al-Qaeda, or even Daesh, and could use that as a cover to violently suppress them, it has proven much more difficult to do that to the Shia demonstrators who, by and large, were the electoral heartland for most of those in power over close to two decades. It is for that reason that protests continue, with the authorities recently killing four demonstrators in the Shia majority city of Nasiriyah late last month.

In a country such as this, where the political elite are viewed across the ethno-sectarian divide as serving no one’s interests but themselves, is it any wonder that the mere voice of Saddam’s daughter elicits such spasmodic fear?

Despite Saddam’s many well-documented cruelties, the situation in Iraq is so bad that the halls of power in Baghdad still fear the phantom of Saddam that continues to stalk his old palatial complexes, now inhabited by those who sold Iraq out to serve their own interests and having achieved nothing for Iraqis in almost two decades.

It is for that reason that Raghad’s interview, her apportioning blame on Iran’s presence for much of Iraq’s woes, and her open consideration of perhaps a political role in Iraq’s future has so many of Baghdad’s elites agitated and laying awake at night.