In 2009, the Iraqi Prime Minister at the time, Nouri al-Maliki, called on the Security Council to investigate Syria's role in the bombings of "Bloody Wednesday." He accused the Damascus regime of harboring Baathists and terrorists targeting Iraq.
Now, in 2024, the Iraqi Foreign Ministry has condemned Tehran’s missile strikes on Erbil. The Iraqi authorities have said they "will take all necessary legal measures," including “filing a complaint with the United Nations Security Council" against Iran.
Besides launching missiles at the city of Erbil in the Northern Iraqi province of Kurdistan, under the pretext of "deterring national security threats," the IRGC has also hit targets in Syria with missiles.
Well, what does all that mean? What are its implications? The first implication is that the alliance known as the Axis of Resistance, which includes countries like Syria, and Iraq, along with Lebanon and Yemen, is fragile. Its internal struggles are more severe than we know.
This axis of militias is just a means for Iran to impose its influence in the region. It is also a means for making shows of force whenever Iran needs to demonstrate that it is retaliating to attacks on Israel, with Tehran targeting the countries of the Axis of Resistance, not Israel.
There is no shame in reading the previous sentence again. This is the state of affairs that Iran has created in the region. It uses four Arab capitals as arenas for skirmishes with Israel without directly retaliating to it. All that is happening now under the guise of the war in Gaza.
This Iranian chaos forces the analyst and observer to try to unravel complicated threads of a clear crisis. How does Iran strike Iraq and Syria while claiming, especially in the Syrian case, that it has controlled the situation there, while now targeting Syrian territory in defense of an attack said to have occurred in Iran?
It's an untenable situation that affirms the Iranian regime’s intention to push the idea that it is retaliating to the United States and Israel but on the territory of Arab countries. Indeed, Iran uses Arab territory as scorched earth on which it pursues its regional objectives while avoiding direct confrontation with Israel or the United States.
This scenario is chaotic par excellence and reflects the degree of chaos in the Arab countries where Iran dominates namely Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. This chaotic scene reinforces its destruction of statehood in the Arab world.
As a result of this chaos, Israel is targeting South Lebanon, the US and Britain are striking the Houthis in Yemen, and the US is pounding Iranian militias in Iraq, with no harm done on Iranian territory.
Accordingly, the countries of the so-called Axis of Resistance are part of an alliance of states "battered" by Iran and its militias, as well as the West, creating chaos that attests to the fragility of the Iranian militia alliance.
This fragile alliance lives on because there is no clear international and Arab strategy to confront these militias and the Iranian project for the region. Whenever a battle erupts, Iran hides behind these countries, using them as shields and scorched earth.
To sum up, the current chaos suggests that we will see more collapses and disorder.
