Undeclared Battle Between US, Iran on Syrian-Iraqi Front

The Iraqi border has a special strategic appeal. It was once called the “Eastern Front” with Iran. The western side has now become the “front” with Iran as well. With undeclared insistence that is spoiled only by “mysterious raids”, a hidden US-Iranian struggle to capture the Iraqi-Syrian borders is raging.

A new player has joined the battle. Russia has plunged into this complex theater, expanding its military presence in the US sphere of influence and meddling with Al-Tanf base through the gate of Al-Rakban camp. Talks emerged about some Syrian fighters from the pro-Washington forces abandoning their camps and training to attack US-protected Syrian oil fields.

Back in 2017, the expulsion of ISIS by various Iraqi forces led to the deployment of many military and paramilitary forces in the Al-Qaim-Albukamal border area.

Many militias have had close links with Iran and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). These ties helped in transforming the border region to become a passage for Tehran through which it could extend its regional influence.

In March 2019, Washington announced the complete eradication of ISIS by liberating Al-Baghouz, in cooperation with its allies in the Syrian Democratic Forces.

This has reinforced the United States and Israel’s view of the border region as a pivotal front in efforts to contain Iranian influence.

In recent years, Iran’s support for the Syrian and Iraqi governments in their fight against their armed opponents strengthened Tehran’s ties with the two countries. Nevertheless, the IRGC established an extended network of cross-border paramilitary groups that restricted the freedom of both governments to operate independently of Iranian interests.

The network includes fighters from Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria who fought alongside Iraqi and Syrian government forces against ISIS or Syrian opponents, making the two governments increasingly dependent on such support, even if the situation is more complicated in Syria due to the role of Russia and Turkey.

Iran’s Ambitions

Several studies offer an integrated assessment of the reasons that prompted Iran to reinforce its presence in Al-Qaim-Albukamal. The Carnegie paper mentioned four reasons: First, Tehran seeks to prevent ISIS from rebuilding its forces inside the areas bordering Iraq and Syria.

Second, securing a land corridor to link areas under Iranian influence in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, to control the movement of people, weapons, and goods across the border.

Third, Tehran wants to block Washington’s attempts to use the border region as a base to counter Iranian influence. Fourth, Iran needs to retain its ability to militarily reinforce Hezbollah in Lebanon and deploy other militias backed by the Iranian Guards in the Fertile Crescent region in the event of a conflict with Israel.

The German Institute for International and Security Affairs says that Iran’s establishment of a land corridor to link it with Lebanon via Iraq and Syria will enable it to better support its affiliated groups in the three countries, as well as to transfer weapons and equipment to Hezbollah.

The US Ambitions

US officials have repeatedly said that one of their main goals in Syria was to “curb” or “end” Iran’s influence. Through the international coalition, Washington supports the Syrian Democratic Forces in their control of the east of the Euphrates with soldiers, land bases, air cover and oil protection equipment.

The US has two bases in Iraq and Syria: One of them is in Tanf, near the Tanf-Al-Walid border crossing, which is currently closed between Syria and Iraq. The other base, Ain Al-Assad, is located in Al-Anbar Governorate, near the Al-Baghdadi suburb. US President Donald Trump visited the base in December 2018 and announced that it would be used to keep Washington’s eye on Iranian activities in the region.

Besides, US forces were earlier deployed near the old railway station in Al-Qaim during the battle against ISIS. The Carnegie paper says militias backed by the IRGC have used the US deployment in western Iraq to justify their presence near the border. Iraqi officials from Anbar said the United States was trying to build new bases in the city of Rummaneh, north of Al-Qaim.

On December 29, 2019, US forces launched airstrikes against factions supported by the IRGC near the border, three of them in Iraq and two in Syria. The move sparked strong condemnations from the Iraqi government.

Washington said that the airstrikes were in response to attacks by the Hezbollah brigades against a military base in northern Iraq, which killed a US military contractor.

The attack aggravated tension between the United States and Iranian-backed groups and the Iraqi government, as the Trump administration ordered the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Al-Quds Force.

Iran avenged the killing by firing missiles against two US military bases in Iraq.

The Economic Dimension

There is another dimension to the rivalry between the United States and Iran to rebuild the border area and the roads leading to the region.

The German Institute cites an economic reason: It has been known since 2013 that the Belt and Road initiative is a priority in Chinese foreign policy to facilitate trade between East and West.

In the initial plans to link China with Europe, the priority was to build northern routes through Russia and Central Asia, along with a sea route through the Arabian Gulf. Nevertheless, Tehran is trying to draw Beijing’s interest in a southern land route linking Iran, Iraq and Syria with the Mediterranean Sea and then to Europe.

In November 2018, Iran revealed a plan to build a railway linking the Shalamcheh border crossing located on the Iran-Iraq border with the Basra port in southeastern Iraq. The line is then supposed to extend towards the Syrian coast.

Sources quoted by the researchers of the Carnegie paper talking about a project that includes building a network of highways between Baghdad and the two border crossings - frall on the Jordanian border and Al-Tanf on the Syrian border. The highway network is also to be connected via a secondary road from Rutba to the Al-Qaim-Albukamal border crossing, with an extension into Syria from the Al-Qaim-Albukamal road.

In March 2017, the government of Haider al-Baghdadi approved a proposal from the Anbar province to grant a US company a contract to invest in highway repairs and protect construction workers and travelers.

The contract also included a plan to develop an international highway linking Baghdad and Arar on the Saudi border, as well as building a new highway linking Anbar directly to the border.

But the project has faced opposition from many members of the Iraqi parliament, including groups allied to Iran. The wave of controversy led to the abandonment of the contract and the assignment of Iraqi security forces with the task of protecting the highway.

According to a former Anbar official, who was directly involved in the talks, pro-Iranian groups rallied against the project because they saw it as a US attempt to expand its influence inside Anbar and western Iraq.

Pro-Iranian groups have sought to develop alternative plans to use the highways in Iraq to expand and consolidate their influence along the border.

There are currently attempts to build a road from Karbala to Al-Qaim-Albukamal region to facilitate the movement of Popular Mobilization Forces and civilians, who visit shrines in Syria.

Tehran and its allies are seeking to connect the Al-Qaim-Albukamal region to a wider network of pro-Iranian groups to unite them in the face of the United States and its allies.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) affirmed that the Iranian forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah continue recruitment operations in a covert and public manner in the western banks of the Euphrates.

It said that around 3,600 young Syrian men of different ages were recruited into the ranks of Iranian forces and affiliated militias, amid the US-Iranian conflict and Russia’s entry on the line by expanding its deployment east of the Euphrates, establishing a military base in Qamishli and deploying a missile system under the US umbrella.

The Syrian-Iraqi border has turned into a complex front for regional-international conflict.

The strategies of these countries depend on their ability to penetrate the local environment, which has transferred its allegiance over decades and years from one party to another.

Iran and the United States will hold talks Saturday in Oman, their third round of negotiations over Tehran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program.

The talks follow a first round held in Muscat, Oman, where the two sides spoke face to face. They then met again in Rome last weekend before this scheduled meeting again in Muscat.

Trump has imposed new sanctions on Iran as part of his “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the country. He has repeatedly suggested military action against Iran remained a possibility, while emphasizing he still believed a new deal could be reached by writing a letter to Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to jumpstart these talks.

Khamenei has warned Iran would respond to any attack with an attack of its own.

Here’s what to know about the letter, Iran’s nuclear program and the tensions that have stalked relations between Tehran and Washington since the 1979 revolution.

Why did Trump write the letter? Trump dispatched the letter to Khamenei on March 5, then gave a television interview the next day in which he acknowledged sending it. He said: “I’ve written them a letter saying, ‘I hope you’re going to negotiate because if we have to go in militarily, it’s going to be a terrible thing.’”

Since returning to the White House, the president has been pushing for talks while ratcheting up sanctions and suggesting a military strike by Israel or the US could target Iranian nuclear sites.

A previous letter from Trump during his first term drew an angry retort from the supreme leader.

But Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his first term led to face-to-face meetings, though no deals to limit Pyongyang’s atomic bombs and a missile program capable of reaching the continental US.

How did the first round go? Oman, a sultanate on the eastern edge of the Arabian Peninsula, hosted the first round of talks between Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff. The two men met face to face after indirect talks and immediately agreed to this second round in Rome.

Witkoff later made a television appearance in which he suggested 3.67% enrichment for Iran could be something the countries could agree on. But that’s exactly the terms set by the 2015 nuclear deal struck under US President Barack Obama, from which Trump unilaterally withdrew America.

Witkoff hours later issued a statement underlining something: “A deal with Iran will only be completed if it is a Trump deal.” Araghchi and Iranian officials have latched onto Witkoff’s comments in recent days as a sign that America was sending it mixed signals about the negotiations.

Yet the Rome talks ended up with the two sides agreeing to starting expert-level talks this Saturday. Analysts described that as a positive sign, though much likely remains to be agreed before reaching a tentative deal.

Why does Iran’s nuclear program worry the West? Iran has insisted for decades that its nuclear program is peaceful. However, its officials increasingly threaten to pursue a nuclear weapon. Iran now enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels of 60%, the only country in the world without a nuclear weapons program to do so.

Under the original 2015 nuclear deal, Iran was allowed to enrich uranium up to 3.67% purity and to maintain a uranium stockpile of 300 kilograms (661 pounds). The last report by the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s program put its stockpile at 8,294.4 kilograms (18,286 pounds) as it enriches a fraction of it to 60% purity.

US intelligence agencies assess that Iran has yet to begin a weapons program, but has “undertaken activities that better position it to produce a nuclear device, if it chooses to do so.”

Ali Larijani, an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, has warned in a televised interview that his country has the capability to build nuclear weapons, but it is not pursuing it and has no problem with the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections. However, he said if the US or Israel were to attack Iran over the issue, the country would have no choice but to move toward nuclear weapon development.

“If you make a mistake regarding Iran’s nuclear issue, you will force Iran to take that path, because it must defend itself,” he said.

Why are relations so bad between Iran and the US? Iran was once one of the US’s top allies in the Middle East under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who purchased American military weapons and allowed CIA technicians to run secret listening posts monitoring the neighboring Soviet Union. The CIA had fomented a 1953 coup that cemented the shah’s rule.

But in January 1979, the shah, fatally ill with cancer, fled Iran as mass demonstrations swelled against his rule. The revolution followed, led by Khomeini, and created Iran’s theocratic government.

Later that year, university students overran the US Embassy in Tehran, seeking the shah’s extradition and sparking the 444-day hostage crisis that saw diplomatic relations between Iran and the US severed. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s saw the US back Saddam Hussein. The “Tanker War” during that conflict saw the US launch a one-day assault that crippled Iran at sea, while the US later shot down an Iranian commercial airliner that the American military said it mistook for a warplane.

Iran and the US have see-sawed between enmity and grudging diplomacy in the years since, with relations peaking when Tehran made the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. But Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018, sparking tensions in the Middle East that persist today.

Undeclared Battle Between US, Iran on Syrian-Iraqi Front