The fall of Damascus and Baghdad, or large slices thereof, into the rapacious hands of the Islamic State, is no longer a debatable subject of strategic forecasts. Today, the capital cities of Syria and Iraq are within the Islamists’ grasp. The Middle East is about to pay the price for President Barack Obama’s single-minded obsession with a US détente with Tehran and a nuclear accord. It is the end product of Washington’s insistence on playing down ISIS as a formidable opponent and contention that the meager US-led coalition air campaign destroyed much of its operational capabilities, which proved to be an illusion. Equally fallacious was Obama’s trust in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its terrorist arm, the Al Qods Brigades, to curtail the Islamist momentum.
Washington’s trust has since faded. Tehran too has cooled to the idea.
In March, a group of Iraqi Shiite militias commanded by Al Qods chief Gen. Qassem Soleimani, managed to snatch parts of the Sunni Iraqi town of Tikrit from Islamist grasp. That was Iran’s first and last engagement against ISIS in Iraq. After that, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei decided to pull back from engaging Sunni Muslims in an overt sectarian showdown. It was clear to him, that the battlefield was not Iran’s forte, but rather subversion, clandestine warfare and limited support for local Shiite surrogates.
