Iran Has Emerged as the Main Victor

Posted: September 24th, 2017

By Ahmad Majidyar

Ahmad Khalid Majidyar is a Fellow and the Director of IranObserved Project at the Middle East Institute. From 2008 to 2015, Ahmad worked as a Senior Research Associate at the American Enterprise Institutes, where he co-authored two monographs on Iran: “Iranian Influence in the Levant, Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan” (AEI 2012), and “The Shi’ites of the Middle East: An Iranian fifth column?" (AEI 2014). He also published a number of research papers on Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. As an instructor with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Leadership Development and Education for Sustained Peace program (2008-2016), Ahmad provided graduate-level seminars to more than 3,000 U.S. and NATO military leaders on Afghanistan and the broader region. In addition, he has provided briefings on Iran and Afghanistan at the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, the National Defense University, the State Department and Congress; and he has spoken as a guest analyst at think tanks, universities, and world affairs councils. Ahmad’s articles on Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been published in Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, Daily Telegraph, and Forbes, among others. He has also discussed Middle Eastern topics on the BBC, CNN, Al-Jazeera English, Sky News, CBC Canada, Bloomberg News and Voice of America’s Dari, Farsi, Urdu and English services. Previously, Ahmad worked as a media analyst with the BBC Monitoring in Afghanistan and as a humanitarian aid worker with the UNHCR in Pakistan.

Since the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq in 2011, Iran has been able to exert powerful influence over its majority-Shia Arab neighbor. This became especially apparent in the years following ISIS’ rapid territorial gains in Iraq in 2014. Today, Tehran funds and trains Shia militia in Iraq, enjoys close trade links with Baghdad, and exerts extensive influence over the political system. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke with the Director of the IranObserved project, Ahmad Majidyar, to find out how deep this influence goes and what the United States can do about it.

The Cipher Brief: How deep is Iranian influence over the Iraqi government, and what are Tehran’s primary objectives in the country?

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