Iran Looks to Expand Influence in Iraq When Mosul Falls

Posted: June 2nd, 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.

The battle for the strategic Iraqi city of Mosul has reached its final stage as Iraqi forces close in on the Islamic State’s last stronghold in Mosul’s Old City. The liberation of Mosul, the second-largest Iraqi city and the capital of oil-rich Nineveh province, would mark a watershed moment in the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the broader region. It was in Mosul where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared himself the Caliph of the Islamic State caliphate in July 2014; and he used the city as headquarters to expand the group’s control over other Iraqi regions and into neighboring Syria.

If recent past is prologue, though, the military victory in Mosul will not easily translate into long-term peace and stability unless key security, political, social, and economic challenges in the region are addressed.

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