Following up on my previous post, I started doing a bit or research on Iranian ties to the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), which will almost certainly be the dominant power in Iraq after this Sunday's elecitons.
As a reminder, the UIA is a coalition of religious Shiite parties that was organized by orders of Grand Ayatollah Al-Sistani, the esteemed Shiite cleric. Al-Sistani ordered the parties to form the coalition to prevent splintering the Shia vote. The two largest parties in the UIA are the SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) and the Dawa party (also shows up in English as Daawa or Al-Daawa).
Start with Al-Sistani. Sistani is himself Iranian by birth. In fact his name refers to the Sistan region of Iran where his family is from.
The SCIRI Party – this party was formed in Tehran by Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who actually left the Dawa party to found SCIRI. His uncle’s cousin was the religious mentor of Iran’s revolutionary leader Grand Ayatollah Khomeini (when he was exiled in Najaf). The SCIRI name itself refers to an organization Khomeini’s government founded in 1981, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolutions in the World. The goal of this organization was to promote Iranian-style revolutions in other countries, starting with those with large Shia populations (e.g. Iraq).
The Dawa Party – this is an old Iraqi Shia party that was driven into exile by Sadaam that ended up under Iranian patronage. Americans have experience with it – it was ultimately behind the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran that turned into the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. This starts back in 1983, when the Iraqi Dawa party arranged two suicide bombings in Kuwait, targeting the American and French embassies. Kuwait arrested 17 members of Dawa (referred to as the Dawa 17 or Kuwait 17). Immediately afterward, Americans started being kidnapped in Lebannon (including the CIA station chief William Buckley and the CNN Bureau chief Jeremy Levin) and in each case the ransom demanded was the release of the Dawa 17. Knowing that Iran was their patron, an arrangement was made whereby the Reagan administration was to funnel arms to Iran in return for their releasing the hostages. Incidentally, today’s leaders of Dawa in Iraq don’t deny any of this but simply say the ‘Dawa 17’ were not acting on party orders, rather they had been co-opted by Iranian intelligence.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of ties - but I thought I'd post findings as I continue research on the topic.
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