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U.S. Wants Control Over Anbar And Beyond – Iraq and Syria Will Prevent It
The U.S. is casting its net over the desert between Iraq and Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to install military bases and power-structures that will guarantee major influence in the area for the foreseeable future. A part of that plan is to develop Sunni proxy forces that will keep the government forces of Damascus and Baghdad out of the area. Another part is to privatize important infrastructure to keep it under direct U.S. control.
To privatize the Iraqi Highway 1 between Baghdad and the Jordanian capital Amman, is a major point in these plans. According to the NYT:
As part of an American effort to promote economic development in Iraq and secure influence in the country after the fight against the Islamic State subsides, the American government has helped broker a deal between Iraq and Olive Group, a private security company, to establish and secure the country’s first toll highway.
Map by New York Times
The map shows Highway 1 from Baghdad to Amman. Notice the road junction east of the Jordan-Iraq border. There the road splits with one branch going north-west towards Damascus. The point where that road crosses from Iraq to Syria is the al-Tanf border station currently occupied by U.S. forces and their British and Norwegian auxiliaries as well some Syrian "rebels" under U.S. control. The U.S. recently bombed a convoy of Syrian and allied Iraqi forces which was moving towards that area. The U.S. military dropped leaflets to Syrian troops to order them to stay away from their own border. Who the f*** do those U.S. troops think they are? What is there justification to be there in the first place? Large Iraq and Syrian government forces are now moving towards al-Tanf from the two sides of the border to evict the occupiers. Iraq, Syria, Iran and Russia have agreed that no U.S. position will be tolerated there. U.S. and other foreign troops will either move out voluntary from al-Tanf or they will be removed by force.
Highway 1 and its branch to Damascus is the most important economic lifeline between Syria and Jordan in the west and Iraq and beyond in the east. Whoever controls it, controls major parts of commerce between those countries. Iraq is a country with rich resources. While it is under economic strains after decades of U.S. sanctions and war against it by the U.S. and Takfiri proxy forces it has no long-term need to rent out such major real estate.
Nevertheless the current Iraqi government under Prime Minister al-Abadi signed a preliminary agreement for a 25 year contract with the U.S. company:
Mr. Abadi has awarded the development project to Olive Group, although the final details are still being worked out. The project would include repairing bridges in western Anbar Province; refurbishing the road, known as Highway 1; and building service stations, rest areas and roadside cafes. It would also include mobile security by private contractors for convoys traveling the highway.
Al Abeidi is now under pressure from the Shia majority who elected him into office to renounce the deal. It is obviously that the deal is not in their interest nor that of the country. According to U.S. diplomats one purpose of the deal is:
pushing back on the influence of Shiite Iran, whose growing power in Iraq has alarmed important Sunni allies of the United States like Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Iran has little to do with the road. It is the Shia majority of Iraq that would benefit most from free flowing traffic and commerce on it.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have enabled the Sunni insurgency in Iraq of which ISIS is just the latest incarnation. To allow the U.S. to control the road and thereby Anbar province in the name of Turkey and Saudi Arabia would guarantee that future Sunni insurgencies could threaten Baghdad whenever "needed". Just remember how Obama said he used ISIS to throw then Prime Minster Maliki out of office:
The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.
A U.S. controlled west-Iraq and south-eastern Syria would be a highway for Saudi Arabian miscreants from their country up towards Baghdad and Damascus. It would be an incarnation of the "Salafist principality" the U.S. and other early ISIS supporters have wished for since at least 2012.
The U.S. is willing to obfuscate and to lie to further its imperial plans. The NYT is, as usual, complicit in that:
Playing on painful memories and fears of Iraqis, news outlets have also run false reports that Blackwater — the private security firm that acted with impunity in the early days of the American occupation and gunned down innocent Iraqis in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007 — had taken on the project.
“The politics of this country are challenging,” said Christian Ronnow, executive vice president of Constellis, the parent company of Olive Group, a private security firm that has worked for years in Iraq.
What the NYT claims are "false reports" are in fact reasonable conclusions:
The [Constellis] Group combines the specialized skills and operational excellence of ACADEMI, Edinburgh International, Strategic Social and Triple Canopy,
ACADEMI
is an American private military company founded in 1997 by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince as Blackwater, renamed as XE Services in 2009 and now known as Academi since 2011 after the company was acquired by a group of private investors.
Olive Group is Constellis Group is Academi is Blackwater – the "false reports" in Iraqi media are way more truthful on that than the NYT is.
The U.S. project in Anbar province and its potential control of Highway 1 through private U.S. forces threatens to put an economic stranglehold on Iraq, Syria and Jordan. I trust that nationalist forces in those countries as well as their allies will do their best to prevent it.
Correction to Hayder’s correction: Maliki and Abadi were members of the same party, Dawa, and thus, the same voting list. In open list system parties can create lists (they can create common lists for a number of parties) and the votes are cast for a list and a name on the list. The list gets the number of seats as a function of all votes cast on the list. The list participants who get parliamentary seats are decided by the number of votes cast on them. Therefore the leaders of a party cannot pre-determine who will be actually elected, and it is particularly interesting when several parties form a joint list — which party would gain most from the arrangement is determined by the popular vote.
Maliki have run as a prime minister, so he automatically had a huge name recognition. The average number of votes per seat was 100,000, so his “personal vote” was sufficient to elect 7 more deputies, but it was not up to him to decide who they would be. Abadi lacked his personal political “sub-machine” (of Dawa’s party political machine) so he was near the tail of Dawa’s list. That said, the position of PM and the membership of the cabinet is not decided by the popular vote but by the parliament that can replace PM at any time. After the spectacular debacle of ISIS taking over huge swath of Iraq, there was a natural public and parliamentary sentiment “anybody but Maliki”.
Abadi was a compromise figure. He is from the same party as Maliki, which is natural (even if not automatic) as this party was the largest in the parliament. It is a bit unfortunate that politics in Iraq is wide open to external pressures, but he was “acceptable” to USA and Iran (as was the case with Maliki). Unlike Hadi of Yemen who also was supposed to be a compromise figure, until today Abadi seems to stick to a compromise course, e.g. the military gets weapons from USA and Russia, among many suppliers (while Hadi turned to be a Saudi puppet). It is an interesting question how a compromise between Iran and USA can work in practice.
A Sunni politician was nominated for Defense Minister, and however sensible, one can see American influence here. The government also allows Popular Mobilization Units to operate, and one can see Iranian influence there. Obama spent enormous effort to sideline PMU from the fight against ISIS, and that manifestly failed, e.g. just today PMU got control of the point on Euphrates (and the highway along Euphrates) on Iraqi-Syrian border, while a number of PMU units operate in Syria, and were active participants in the recent advances against ISIS and FSA in the deserts of south-east Syria. The plan is clearly to create a cordon line from Damascus to Iraqi territory under the joint control of SAA and PMU. Trump made a token gesture to derail that plan by bombing “a little” SAA and PMU as they were approaching the point of contact, and dropping leaflets that proclaimed Tanf (the juncture of borders of Iraq, Syria and Jordan) and 50 km/35 miles around a “free fire zone” in respect to SAA and allies. It seems that the latter decided to protest that verbally, and on the ground, complete the cordon line to the north of Tanf and to the south of Euphrates. That would temporarily leave a swath of barren desert to FSA.
Iraq politics are more Byzantine than anywhere, but it is clear that the Defense Ministry is the locus of American influence that styles itself to protect human rights, of Sunnis in particular, and PMU are the locus of Iranian influence, as Iran supplied them with weapon and training, while Shia political movements were most active in recruiting. Obama maneuvers failed, and Trump seems to be doing a bare minimum to appease lucrative allies in the Gulf.
Concerning the contracts for Baghdad-Jordan highways, the strategic implications may be small. The contract may be less corrupt than Iraqi average, perhaps more than 50% will be spend on the actual road work etc. The contractor may manipulate the speed of roadwork according to American wishes (but hard to tell if American would wish the work to be faster or slower). And providing security for convoys, can you imagine a convoy of several thousands of PMU members with some heavy military hardware requesting the security or obeying the “STOP” signs or instructions? Of course, American can bomb such convoys, but if that would be more than a token action, they would have a hell heck to pay.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | May 29 2017 14:06 utc | 7
How Turkey could possibly support Kurds selling oil. They’ve already got their hands full with their own Kurdish minority… Posted by: c1ue | May 30, 2017 11:17:38 AM | 47
This is rather simple. If you know the history of Erdogan, he is not a Kurd hater. He started his rule by “democratic reforms” that included giving Kurds some limited cultural rights, singing Kurdish songs in public or running a radio station in Kurdish was allowed. Then he started a “peace process” with PKK. And as expected, AKP gained votes of the more conservative Turkish Kurds. Turkish Kurds are numerous and not monolithic at all. For example, there is a Turkish province with Kurdish majority where Islamists are very popular. Many ethnic Kurds got assimilated, and can be found in every strand of Turkish culture and politics. Interestingly, one theologian of Kurdish ethnicity got rather wide following, and is venerated by Hizmet movement headed by Fetullah Gülen. However, Erdogan is obsessed with his own personal greatness that requires dictatorial powers de iure, not just de facto, and proper accouterments of such great personage, like enormous palace etc. That requires a change of the constitution which requires a parliamentary supermajority.
PKK leaders may have limited horizons, but what they should know well is the history of Soviet Communist Party, and what is the fate of fellow travelers of a dictator if their loyalty can be questioned. Some are exterminated as the right deviationists, some as Bonapartists, some as left deviationists, there are plenty of possibilities but none of them is appealing. Kurdish political movement with close ties to PKK got 16% of the vote, jumping over 10% threshold that Turkish law has specifically to thwart the minorities (i.e. Kurds) under the slogan “we will not let you be a President” (with super-powers). Since then, Erdogan is wrath personified, and being intelligent, he figured that if Kurds are not helping him, he can use a splendid civil war to get where he wants. He got the votes of fascist-nationalists and arrested enough Kurdish deputies to get proper majority (plus a referendum which was almost hilariously fraudulent but which approved the constitution reform with ca. 52% majority, Erdogan has some vestigial sense of modesty).
In other words, this is not a conflict of Turkey with Kurds, as it could be under the rule of Kemalist nationalists, but rather personal conflict of Erdogan with PKK + HDP. Syrian Kurds live mostly along Turkish border, speak the same dialect as in Turkey, and during the years of Kemalists repression, many Turkish Kurds fled to Syria, including some cadres of PKK that organized Kurds in Syria. Thus Erdogan “automatically” is in conflict with PYD. But the situation in Iraq is quite different. While the past generation of leftist leaders of Turkish and Iraqi Kurds was quite close to each other, movements of that nature must “shop” for external help, and Barzanis got very generous deal from Americans, starting from the first Gulf war. Under the protection of “northern no-fly zone”, Iraqi Kurdistan was de-facto independent from Baghdad, and split into to fiefs, Barzanis and Talabanis (I am a bit lazy to check about Talabanis, but Barzanis were at some point Stalinists, the bio entry of Mustafa Barzani describes how he got into a big, big trouble during his exile to Soviet Union, but he successfully saved his life, and the lives of his followers, by writing a very convincing letter to Stalin himself). But as his father had to rely on Stalin’s help, his son Massoud relies on American and Turkish help. There is a good chance that without such help, the combined efforts of Talabanis and other opponents would pry him away from power, and in the aftermath, he could be stripped of all properties in Kurdistan and the family would taste bitterness of exile (in Boca Raton? Provence?)
One can easily explain why Massoud Barzani needs Erdogan, but why Erdogan needs Barzanis? As I have mentioned, he needs accoutrements of a great person, and a zone of influence abroad is one of them. And KRG is the largest foreign piece that Erdogan could find, not for the lack of trying, but the projects in Libya, Egypt and Syria were less rewarding than planned. And there are few bucks that can be made in that fashion. From the perspective of Turkish state the amounts can be paltry, but from the perspective of Erdogan family, nothing to sneer about.
Posted by: Piotr Berman | May 31 2017 2:52 utc | 61
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