All Posts Tagged With: "Al Qaida"

Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Washington-based Brookings Institution,

says Iran has become the number one threat to Iraqi stability in replacing Al Qaida, which until 2008 had been deemed the leading threat to the post-Saddam Hussein government in Baghdad.

Al Qaida is still a serious problem, and could get worse but Al Qaida is very much on the run, and it has fewer and fewer sanctuaries inside Iraq.

On July 16, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he was prepared to recommend additional reductions in the American military presence in Iraq In fact troops have been departing for three months. Mullen said security conditions in Iraq were better than had been envisioned when the U. S. surge began.

O’Hanlon, who toured Iraq in June 2008, said Iran has become the leading facilitator of Shi’ite insurgency groups in Iraq. He said Iran was supplying weapons and training to a range of insurgency groups in an effort to foment chaos in Iraq.

“The Iranians are arming and equipping and funding every imaginable group, and often just trying to stoke violence for its own sake,” O’Hanlon said. “And that’s starting to create a nationalistic backlash among the Iraqi people and government against Iran. There’s a chance that Iran won’t be able to play this game as well as it has in the past.”

“The Iraqi army is now really in charge along with the police,” O’Hanlon said. “Now they [Iraq Army] still need our assistance in certain ways, but they don’t need us, in most cases, to be the lead force. And that’s very good news for Americans who are looking for a day when we can pull ourselves out safely.”