Amid the theatrics and walkouts, the meeting illustrated the magnitude of the defeat suffered by the parties loyal to the Iranian regime in the fourth election since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
Iraqi voters this month made it clear they have had enough of Iran’s violent interference in the country’s politics. Under the direction of Tehran’s Quds Force — the external operations arm of its...
In an unexpected announcement on October 10, a group of Iran-backed Shiite militia groups declared their intention to suspend forthwith their attacks on U.S. interests in Iraq, while conditioning the ceasefire’s...
The March 17 nomination of Adnan al-Zurfi as Iraq’s prime minister-designate highlights the extent to which Iran’s stranglehold on Iraqi politics could be eroding. As such, Zurfi’s nomination holds...
Musical chairs in the Iraqi parliament can no longer solve the country's problems.
Despite the promises of Iraq’s prime minister-designate, Mohammed Allawi, to address the demands of protesters that drove his predecessor from office, his nomination has been met with universal derision...
Amidst a growing backlash against Iranian influence, Tehran compelled its allies in Baghdad to support Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, whose resignation is one of the protesters’ top demands. Tehran’s...
Prime Minister Mahdi is trying to bring the Popular Mobilization Forces under control of the government, but even he probably knows it won’t work.
The Trump administration on Thursday ...
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Iran has its tentacles all over Iraq, and the United States has no one to blame but itself. It is a bipartisan failure dating back to the March 2003 invasion. Even after the Bush administration a...
This week, Iraqi Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced a political alliance with Hadi al-Amiri, leader of a pro-Iran c...
This week, the Iraqi parliament...
I rarely find myself thinking along similar lines as fellow Foreign Policy contributor Stephen Walt. Nevertheless, just as I was contemplating an article that would take note of a few o...
When he won the election, Donald Trump—along with his national security adviser Michael Flynn, his all-purpose counselor Stephen Bannon, and, perhaps, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner—wa...
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, no voice arguing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had greater moral weight than that of Kanan Makiya. As Dexter Filkins put it in a 2007 New York Times Magazi...
In September, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) launched a devastatingly effective offensive in Iraq’s Anbar province that for a time masked the losses the group was experienc...
The general was one of few who understood that Iran was at war with the US, and no bargain could be struck
In March, the Syrian regime began slaughtering peaceful demonstrators in Deraa, a small city close to the Jordanian border. In August, the American president called for the man responsible for th...