This report addresses Iran's dual-strategy of providing military aid to Iraqi militia groups while simultaneously giving political support to Iraqi political parties. Although the report details the scope and nature of Iranian support to Iraqi militias, it concludes that Iran's political efforts are the core of its effort to project influence in Iraq. The report also concludes that Iran has recently worked to reduce the level of violence in Iraq while concentrating on a political campaign to shape the SFA and SOFA agreements to its strategic ends. The report does not address Iran's economic and social influence in Iraq.
* Chapter 1 describes Iran's covert operations in Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, including the formation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
* Chapter 2 assesses the trajectory of Iranian intervention in Iraq since 2003.
* Chapters 3 and 4 describe Iranian lethal aid in Iraq and draw heavily on the interrogation summaries of detained militia members.
* Chapter 5 provides key findings and recommendations.
Like many CTC reports, Iranian Strategy in Iraq is partly based on declassified information. In this case, that data includes interrogation summaries of captured militia fighters, Saddam-era Iraqi intelligence reports, and data listing weapons caches found to contain Iranian-made weapons. All of this data has been declassified and approved for release. We hope that this report and the accompanying data will enable other researchers to further analyze the dynamics of Iranian influence in Iraq. We recognize the inherent problems in using some of the sources cited in this report. Indeed, we have serious concerns that Iraqi intelligence agents relied on information from the anti‐Iranian terrorist group, the Mujahidin‐e Khalq Organization (MKO). Data provided by the MKO is sometimes accurate but often considered not credible because of the MKO’s endemic interest in portraying Iran in as negative a light possible. Likewise, unclassified information from Coalition Forces’ SIGACTS reports can lack important context. Finally, information obtained from interrogations of detained militants must be interpreted with extreme caution. Detainees may be misinformed or lying, interrogators may misunderstand or poorly transcribe information, and the context of a detainee’s story may be missing. Readers should be wary of these problems, as we have tried to be.
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