Propelled to power in the new Iraq by the U.S after 9/11
Sheri Laizer | Exclusive to iKurd.net
Forty-one years ago on 15 December 1981, the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut was bombed. Who was behind it but the man the U.S would propel to the premiership of its ‘new Iraq’ twenty years later.
Going by the code names of Abu Isra, Jawad al-Ali and Sayyed Mohsen al-Maliki’s Shiite al-Da’wa Party (Islamic call) cell had been set up by Iran to operate in Lebanon and Syria. The first major target of the Haidar Brigade in Beirut was the Iraqi Embassy and al-Maliki was in charge of the cell.
The civil war raging in Lebanon (1975-1990) facilitated violent acts, but the ‘kamikaze’ strike was part of Iran’s war with Iraq and not the civil war.
In 1975, al-Dawa had issued a fatwa ordering its members to infiltrate the Lebanese Amal (Hope) Movement. In his book on Hezbollah, Sheikh Naim Qassem describes the process: “The Islamists were divided between the Amal Movement, the Islamic Committees, al-Dawa Party and the independents… As political activity was limited to the Amal Movement, some Islamists chose to join it, either out of total belief in this movement or because they felt that it was only a transitional step on the way to another phase.”
On July 16, 1979 [1], Nouri al-Maliki, then aged 29, fled to Iran from Iraq after being exposed as a member of the illegal Islamic al-Da’wa. The following year, an Iraqi court would sentence him to death in absentia. The party was anathema as it backed Ayatollah Khomeini and backed the Ayatollah’s extreme goal of rule by the Islamic jurist. Saddam Hussein cited more than 400 violations by Iran that had spurred him to go to war a year after the Islamic revolution.
Al-Maliki was soon put in charge of a terror training camp inside Iran called the Sadr Camp, named after Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, founder of the al-Da’wa Party, Moqtada al-Sadr’s father-in-law, executed for treason by the Ba’ath Party on April 19, 1980. [2] Al Maliki went on to head the Haidar Brigade affiliated with the Lovers of Hussein under Daoud Daoud’s leadership – a faction of Lebanese Shi’a Amal that al- Da’wa was infiltrating between 1981-1982. The cell was made up of 150 core members from al-Da’wa.
Going under the nom de guerre of Sayyed Mohsen, al-Maliki collaborated with top Shi’a militants, including Imad Mughniyeh, Abdul Halim al Zuhairi, Ali al-Musawi (Haj Elias) and Sabah al-Tufaili. The cell was accountable to Iran’s Ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashami (1947-2021), responsible for helping to set up the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) and the group that would later evolve into Lebanese Hezbollah. He himself became Iran’s Interior Minister. [3]
Al Maliki’s group was tasked with targeting Iraqi, American, and French interests in Syria and Syrian controlled Lebanon. It is also reputed to have assassinated several top PLO commanders who then went after the cell in revenge.
Al Da’wa bombing of the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut, 15 December 1981
Al Da’wa carried out the very first suicide bombing in Beirut, striking the Iraqi Embassy. On December 15, 1981, a car laden with explosives was driven by a suicide bomber beneath the Iraqi Embassy building on the Corniche in west Beirut. Two explosions were heard as the multi-storey building collapsed from the centre down, killing 61 people, and injuring some 110 others. Iraqi’s Ambassador, Abdel Razzal Mohammed Lafta, emerged alive from the rubble but several of his staffers working in the press office, among them Harith Taqa, and Mrs Belqis al-Rawi, perished.
Belqis al-Rawi was the Baghdad-born wife of the renowned Damascus-born diplomat, writer and poet, Nizar Qabbani (21.03.1923- 30.04.1998). A teacher by profession, she was the daughter of an Iraqi officer and a vocal Pan-Arab activist. She reputedly also supported the Palestinian cause. Nizar Qabbani was devastated by her loss and wrote a poem in her memory still cited by the Arab literary world. Several lines quoted below capture his grief:
A Poem for Balqis(1982) [4]
…Balqis,
Perfume in my memory!
O tomb, travelling in the clouds!
They killed you in Beirut, like just any gazelle,
After killing speech itself.
Balqis,
This is not an elegy,
But to the Arabs, a farewell,
Balqis,
We miss you… we miss you… we miss you…
Every year Iraqi exiles driven from their country since the 2003 invasion commemorate December 15th as the day love died. Nizar never again wrote of love. He had met his beloved during a visit to Baghdad where the ninth Arab poetry festival was being held. His was already a distinguished name and especially for his praise of women.
Footage broadcast by Pathe captured the chaotic aftermath of the bombing. Nouri al-Maliki would be formally accused of this years later by Belqis al-Rawi’s family in a 2014 lawsuit in the international court: “Al-Maliki’s role was decisive in this bombing, as he was directly responsible for the cell that carried out the accident, including planning the operation, preparing equipment and explosives, conducting reconnaissance and securing, according to the Al-Rawi family…”5
Nora Boustany reporting for The Washington Post noted the day after the attack: “The head of the Iraqi News Agency (INA), Khaled Gheidan, who was released from the hospital later in the day, was quoted as saying that he had been buried under the walls and bricks for an hour and a half…In a telephone call to Agence France-Presse, a previously unknown group calling itself the Iraqi Liberation Army-General Command claimed responsibility for the attack…”
The INA blamed intelligence agents of the Syrian and Iranian governments for the incident, she continued. “A roadblock manned by Syrian soldiers belonging to the all-Syrian Arab Deterrent Force stands close to the embassy…The Iraqi Embassy is among the best-guarded missions in Beirut, due to a history of attacks against Iraqi establishments over the past 15 months. Groups supporting either Iran or Iraq in the war between the two countries have engaged in street battles in Lebanon for months.6 This activity further complicated the internal dynamics behind the Lebanese civil war.
The same day, President Saddam Hussein spoke with PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, who contacted Christian militia leader, Michel Aoun (years later Aoun would switch sides to support Hezbollah) and paid him in cash to smuggle a shipload of arms, food and medical supplies to the PLO through the port of Jounieh that lies in the Christian-controlled sector east of Beirut. Palestinian factions and actors like Abu Nidal were being hosted by Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Yasser Arafat was also 7given a house in Beirut’s Amiriyah district.
Almost two years after, in April 1983, al-Maliki’s cell sent another suicide bomber off to attack the US Embassy in Beirut. The bombing killed 63 people, including 17 Americans. Just six months later the Beirut headquarters of the US Marines were designated for attack. After 241 personnel were killed the US withdrew its forces from Lebanon.
That same month, a Beirut-based French military post was struck, killing 58 French soldiers who were deployed there as part of the multinational forces present in Lebanon.
The next major terrorist operation in which al-Maliki is accused of involvement is the June 1985 hijacking and hostage-taking mission of TWA flight 847 on route from Cairo to the United States stopping in Athens. The aim of the high jacking was to secure the release of 700 Shi’a detainees being held in Israeli prisons.8 Israel had invaded Lebanon in 1982 under Ariel Sharon and held the mainly Shi’a swathe of southern Lebanon.
In addition to his leadership role in the Haidar Brigade, al-Maliki was also involved in the media arm of Nabih Berri’s Amal media. He was then aged 35. Amal handled all the press matters concerning the high jacking as well as handling staged releases of the hostages. A blameless young American diver, Robert Stethem, was killed outright and his body was tossed out of the aircraft onto the tarmac in Beirut airport. Seven American passengers, alleged to have Jewish-sounding surnames, were taken off the jet and held hostage in a Shia prison in Beirut. [10]
Beirut International Airport, (renamed Rafiq Hariri International Airport after Syria and Hezbollah’s 2005 Beirut assassination of the prime minister in 2005) lies within a Shi’a controlled zone in the Dahiyya, Beirut’s southern suburbs. Today it remains largely in Hezbollah’s hands rather than under the control of Amal. In 1982, after the Israeli military incursion of Lebanon, Amal was busy liquidating Palestinian militants from the PLO in the course of the war against the Palestinian refugee camps (Harb al mukhayamat). After a siege lasting ten weeks Arafat’s fighters were ousted and evacuated by sea to Tunisia. In 1985 Israel established an occupation zone controlling 15 km deep inside Lebanon backed by mainly Christian militia collaborators the South Lebanon Army (SLA) [9]. They would remain there for the next twenty-two years until the year 2000. [10]
Nouri al-Maliki was reputedly active during the siege and massacres carried out in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut in this period. The Haidar Brigade was particularly brutal inside the camps. They murdered over 50 PLO resistance fighters but the Palestinians fought on and succeeded in driving the rest to Syria and Iran. Al-Maliki escaped to Damascus. The PLO kept several tape recordings of testimonies from the prisoners they captured from al-Maliki’s cell and passed them to the Ba’ath government in Iraq. [11]
According to a brief biography on al-Dawa’s own website, al-Maliki had adopted the code name Jawad al-Ali being a member of the Albu Ali tribe. He also went under the alias, Abu Isra, which is how his former mentor, Ali Khedery, remembers him.
Ali Khedery was one of the longest serving US officials in Iraq of Iraqi émigré origins, and was also responsible for getting Exxon Mobil into the Kurdish region. [12] Khedery writing an opinion piece for the Washington Post in July 2014 after ISIA had seized control of much of Iraq looked back on his years close to al-Maliki saying, “I have known Maliki, or Abu Isra,… for more than a decade. I have traveled across three continents with him. I know his family and his inner circle. When Maliki was an obscure member of parliament, I was among the very few Americans in Baghdad who took his phone calls. In 2006, I helped introduce him to the U.S. ambassador, recommending him as a promising option for prime minister…In 2009, I lobbied skeptical regional royals to support Maliki’s government.”
He continued: “By 2010, however, I was urging the vice president of the United States and the White House senior staff to withdraw their support for Maliki. I had come to realize that if he remained in office, he would create a divisive, despotic and sectarian government that would rip the country apart and devastate American interests. His article is headed Why we stuck with Maliki – and lost Iraq. The leader read: “To understand why Iraq is imploding, you must understand Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki — and why the United States has supported him since 2006.”
Khedery even mentions the suicide bombings and al-Maliki’s unfettered return to Iraq, thus: “With Iran’s assistance, Da’wa operatives bombed the Iraqi Embassy in Beirut in 1981 in one of radical Islam’s first suicide attacks. They also bombed the American and French embassies in Kuwait and plotted a car bomb attack on the convoy carrying the emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber al-Sabah. [13] The late PMF leader, Jamal Ibrahimi, better known as Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes, was accused by the Kuwaiti judiciary of being behind the plot. The Kuwaiti National Oil Company, a government owned power station and the Raytheon Corporation installation were also targeted. “The U.S. government eventually cleared Dawa’s main branch of responsibility for the attack in Kuwait. But U.S. officials declined to authorize meetings with senior Dawa leaders until 2002 – the year before the invasion was finally launched.
Scores of assassination attempts by al-Da’wa agents continued throughout the 1980s. Saddam Hussein and Vice President, Tariq al-Aziz both escaped assassination attempts by al-Da’wa.
Al-Maliki formally sent Saddam Hussein to the gallows after manipulating the trial judges and the verdict during his premiership n 2006, [14] and received the late president’s corpse in the Green Zone by helicopter afterwards, personally rejoicing in the revenge. [15]
The IRGC got stronger, moving key operations into the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon in 1982 after the Israeli invasion, arming and training Shi’a proxy, Hezbollah. They “occupied barracks belonging to the Lebanese Army, set up training camps for Shiite fighters, opened hawzas, created a radio station, published a newspaper and organized centers for activists, among other things.”
In tandem, al-Da’wa leaders that had infiltrated Amal back in 1975 created another offshoot in the Bekaa they called Islamic Amal (Islamic Hope). The various factions held a series of meetings to form a unified party structure, which by the end of 1983 under the supervision of the IRGC would become Hezbollah. Hezbollah did not announce its official program for another two years. [16]
Lebanese Shiites who had been part of Da’wa had also returned to Beirut, including some key activists who would go on to become Hezbollah leaders like Sheikh Subhi al-Tufayli, Sayyed Ali el-Amine, Abbas al-Musawi and Sheikh Ali Kourani. [17]
While living in Damascus, Nouri al-Maliki handled operations for al-Dawa, coordinating with Hezbollah and the IRGC and spearheading Iran’s efforts to overthrow the Ba’ath in Iraq. [9] He also edited the party newspaper Al-Mawqif and rose to head the party’s Syrian branch.
In 1990, al-Maliki joined the Joint Action Committee of the Syrian-based opposition against Saddam that evolved into the INC. [8] The Da’wa Party participated in the Iraqi National Congress between 1992 and 1995. The Kurds had given al-Maliki shelter after the 1991 uprising. He would ill repay them for this hospitality after the 2017 independence referendum doing everything in his power to subvert the results and stifle the Kurdish aspirations in close co-operation with IRGC QF chief, Qassem Soleimani. [18]
Upon his return to Iraq by taxi in April 2003, before twice becoming prime minister, al-Maliki was deputy leader of the Supreme National Deba’athification Commission under Ahmad Chalabi’s direction and was also appointed to the transitional assembly in January 2005 and the committee that drafted the deeply flawed Islamic leaning new constitution for Iraq that was passed in October 2005.
A paper in the World Policy Journal titled Notes from the Underground: The Rise of Nouri al-Maliki and the New Islamists by Ned Parker and Raheem Salman, claims: “In 2003 he returned to Iraq by taxi. In the morning, the three drafted a party statement and phoned fellow Da’wa members, who waited in Kurdistan for news…
“Trusted friends like Abu Mujahid, a squat, tubby man who drove Maliki around during his Damascus days had come back from his new life as a butcher in Australia. Now he served as protocol secretary, controlling access to Maliki, while running informant networks that collected intelligence for his friend. Men from the ranks of Da’wa served as his enforcers and represented the party’s voice. Maliki’s first chief of staff, Tareq Abdullah, considered as ruthless as Maliki, would take on any task. Then there were the professional Da’wa security men. Farouq Arraji, a colonel in Hussein’s army and Da’wa member who secretly joined the party in 1963, headed Maliki’s office as commander in chief, establishing direct oversight of the defense and interior ministries that officials resented.
Similarly, Abu Ali Basri, 12 years younger than Maliki, who earned enough of the prime minister’s trust to run his special intelligence office, boasted credentials as the son of a Da’wa Party member executed by Hussein. Basri’s activities, cloaked in mystery, inspired fear among Maliki’s enemies. A U.S. intelligence report claimed, “derogatory information about Ali Basri includes operating secret prisons, torturing, and threatening detainees.” Maliki imposed his own direct hand on security matters, as if he were running underground cells against Saddam’s regime. His office called commanders in the field and angered the Americans by giving units direct orders. Maliki seldom slept and spent hours around the clock monitoring troop operations from his office… In short, the reign of Maliki is an object lesson to other nascent Islamist leaders across the Middle East of how to consolidate one’s rule from the rubble of a toppled state…”19
U.S Advisors pushed for al-Maliki – so, who made the ‘new Iraq?’
George Bush Jnr. who all the while had focused errantly on Saddam Hussein in seeking to impute his involvement in 9/11 ironically appointed the Iran-backed terrorist behind the first suicide bombing – kicking off what would become a terror trend leading directly to 9/11. American-Iraqi advisor, Ali Khedery, said of this only “Although Maliki’s history was known to be shadowy and violent, that was hardly unusual in the new Iraq.” [20]
Nouri al-Maliki, Badr Brigade/Organisation commander, Hadi al-Ameri,21 and Kata’ib Hezbollah leader/PMF frontrunner, Abu Mahdi al-Muhendes had close involvement with Iran and the IRGC since the Islamic revolution. Abu Mahdi was the mastermind behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait in 1983 and became al-Maliki’s advisor and neighbour in the Green Zone. They were instrumental in placing Iraq at Iran’s service hand in hand with the late Qassem Soleimani. Ali Khedery hit the nail on the head when he summed up the position they created, in these words: “Our debates mattered little, however, because the most powerful man in Iraq and the Middle East, Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, was about to resolve the crisis for us…”
He continued: “In short, Maliki’s one-man, one-Dawa-party Iraq looks a lot like Hussein’s one-man, one-Baath Party Iraq. But at least Hussein helped contain a strategic American enemy: Iran. And Washington didn’t spend $1 trillion propping him up. There is not much “democracy” left if one man and one party with close links to Iran control the judiciary, police, army, intelligence services, oil revenue, treasury and the central bank. Under these circumstances, renewed ethno-sectarian civil war in Iraq was not a possibility. It was a certainty.” [22]
Ned Parker and Raheem Salman had also observed how al-Maliki “Intimidated his rivals with the creation of his own special brigade and security detention centers that existed outside of any normal chain of command. Police who had been involved in death squad killings in 2005 and 2006 worked in the new jails attached to Maliki’s office. His special forces initiated mass arrests in Sunni communities in Mosul, locking up the men in an undeclared jail in Baghdad, where detainees were raped and tortured. Human rights officials, who Maliki had supported to expose abuses in the police and army, soon found themselves threatened.” [23]
So why did it take the Americans so long to see the obvious? The man they plugged for in their ‘war on terror’ was a top terror master.
Hundreds of secret Iraqi documents revealed since by WikiLeaks have identified the term Frago 242. Experts claim it to equate with an American license that gave al-Maliki the authority to act with impunity. At the same time as playing along outwardly with the Americans, he was also passing sensitive hit lists to America’s chief foe, Iran, of Iraqi professionals including nuclear scientists, officers and academics, Iraqi parliamentarians and former Ba’ath aides.
In its ‘war on terror’ the U.S handed power to Iran-backed terror master, Nouri al-Maliki when the American intelligence services must surely have known his history.
In 2015 the Iraqi parliament referred a report to the judiciary accusing Nouri al-Maliki and his aides of responsibility for the fall of Mosul to ISIS. Other accusations have followed but have still to be acted upon. Today, the momentum driving social media campaigns like #INDICT NOURI AL-MALIKI for war crimes may be growing but al-Maliki continues to turn the wheels of power in Baghdad with front man, Mohammed al-Sudani, now ensconced in power [24].
Al-Sudani recently appointed the head of the highly secretive Falcons Intelligence Unit, (Al Suquor) Abdal Karim Abd Fadel (AKA Abu Ali al-Basri) to head his hand-picked anti-corruption mission. The National News reported how al-Sudani has ordered the setting up of a new anti-corruption body and a supporting security team with “broad powers” that will be led by Abdul Karim Abd Fadel, director general of the Interior Ministry and former head of the secretive Falcons Cell intelligence unit, an organisation that worked closely with former prime minister Nouri Al Maliki who created it in 2009. The report went on: ”The cell, which received direct training from the CIA and Britain’s MI6, gained a solid reputation after making key arrests of Sunni insurgents and thwarting attacks during the fight against Al Qaeda and then ISIS. The unit worked independently and answered directly to Mr Al Maliki, who served from 2006-2014.” [25]
Fadel had been removed from position by Mustafa al-Kadhimi for his alleged closeness to Iran’s proxies and according to al-Monitor was believed to have been “covering” for four individuals in connection with the deaths of activists and journalists. The four were arrested Feb. 15 in Basra. He told al-Monitor in a 2019 interview [26] that his unit did not have any direct contact with the Syrian government but that there was a “four-member operations room” in Baghdad at that time involving Syria, Iran, Iraq and Russia through which information needed to save lives was channeled. [27] He had also said that the unit has “much closer” relations with intelligence units in Sulaimaniyah than with Erbil in the Kurdistan Regional Government area.” [28]This is because of the PUK’s closer ties to Iran.
Since being given the job as Iraq’s new prime minister in October, Mohammed al-Sudani has very swiftly been clearing out many top officials appointed by Mustafa al-Kadhimi who had tried to take on the Shi’a militias and replacing them with those close to the militias and Iran. The new Minister of Education appointed by al-Sudani, for example, is an Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) henchman named Naim al-Abudi.
The Biden Administration has told Iraq via Ambassador Irina Romanowski it will not work with him or with Rabee Nader, appointed by al-Sudani to head his office, who has a history of working with both AAH and Kata’ib Hezbollah’s media.29 Both groups are on the U.S. terrorism list along with affiliate, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada (KSS). [30]
In its ‘war on terror’ the U.S handed power to Iran-backed terror master, Nouri al-Maliki, when the American intelligence services must surely have known his history.
1 Born July 1, 1950 in the Shiite town of Twaireej near the city of Hillah not far from the shrines of Karbala , south of Baghdad. He joined al-Da’wa in 1970 when at university graduating in Islamic studies. He became the party’s general secretary and was re-elected to that role again in 2019. He became the prime minister of Iraq on May 20, 2006. On March 7, 2010 he ran under the State of Law Coalition in the second elections since the US invasion.
2 في ذلك الوقت اللجنة الجهادية للحزب، وانخرط في تدريب مئات العناصر الجهادية التابعة للحزب.
Translated from Arabic by Google: Near the Arab city of Ahwaz, the Iranian authorities allowed the Dawa Party to establish an armed training camp that they called the Sadr Camp. Along with others, Nuri al-Maliki led this camp, as he was heading the party’s jihadist committee at the time, and he was involved in training hundreds of jihadist elements affiliated with the party.
3 Mohtashami’s attitude to the theocracy evolved over time and he joined the cause of the reformists in 2009 standing against Ahmadinejad. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ali-akbar-mohtashamipour-dead/2021/06/07/2ce247c0-c793-11eb-a11b-6c6191ccd599_story.html
4 https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/love-poetry-and-pan-arabism-broken-dream-balqis-and-nizar
5 https://twitter.com/majed_i/status/1586389838626172928
6 https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/12/16/20-killed-100-injured-in-explosion-at-iraqi-embassy-in-lebanese-capital/271c59ca-126f-4a4f-bee0-9f47d2192f46/
7 Real name Sabri Khalil al-Banna, Abu Ridal had split from the PLO in 1974 to form his own more extreme organization, ANO. He died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in August 2002. Read more at https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/story/20403-France-struck-deal-with-Abu-Nidal-in-1980s:-report
8 https://legacyofgena.medium.com/the-real-story-of-the-1985-hijacking-of-twa-flight-847-e091f4acf7ef
9 https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1187230/life-and-death-of-the-south-lebanon-army-sla.html
10 https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2022/10/18/Timeline-At-war-for-decades-Lebanon-and-Israel-agree-a-rare-compromise
11 http://arabwomanblues.blogspot.com/2009/10/nouri-al-malikis-curriculum-vitae.html
12 Khedery now heads Dragoman Partners in Dubai.
13 Ibid.
14 https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/world/western-lawyers-al-maliki-manipulated-saddams-trial/
15 https://ikurd.net/iraq-revenge-and-corruption-2022-05-30
16 https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1156360/hezbollahs-origins-in-the-shadow-of-the-iranian-revolution.html
17 According to Professor Saoud el-Maoula a specialist in Shiite affairs, close to the clerics who went on to form Hezbollah.
18 https://ikurd.net/kirkuk-identity-2018-02-20
19 https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/wpj/v30i1/f_0033049_26903.pdf
20 Op. Cit. Khedery.
21 “In this leaked video, Hadi al-Amiri, one of the individuals who received training in al-Sadr camp, is involved in fighting with the Iranian army against his own country’s army. Hadi al-Amiri went on to become a member of the Iraqi Parliament, a former Minister of Transport, the leader of the Popular Mobilization Brigades and one of Nouri al-Maliki’s closest advisors. He remains powerful.
22 Op. Cit. Khedery.
23 https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/journals/wpj/v30i1/f_0033049_26903.pdf
24 https://ikurd.net/losing-iraq-to-iran-2022-11-14
25 https://www.thenationalnews.com/tags/iraq/
26 https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2019/07/iraq-terrorism-syria-isis-falcon.html
27 https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/02/iraq-security-falcon-basri-militias.html#ixzz7mgOnNFM0
28 Al monitor, 2019 interview.
29 https://shafaq.com/en/Report/The-U-S-tells-Iraq-it-won-t-work-with-some-Iraqi-officials-Asa-ib-Ahl-Al-Haq-responds
30 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-117hr2113ih/html/BILLS-117hr2113ih.htm
Sheri Laizer, a Middle East and North African expert specialist and well known commentator on the Kurdish issue. She is a senior contributing writer for iKurd.net. More about Sheri Laizer see below.
The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.
Copyright © 2022 iKurd.net. All rights reserved
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The Resurrection (Ba’ath) Party – Before the Iran-Iraq War
The War of Attrition on Lebanon
LOSING IRAQ — to Iran
Iraq: Revenge and Corruption
The Suffocation of Iraq Kurdistan
Iran’s Grip on Kirkuk
Margaret Coker’s Book ‘The Spymaster of Baghdad’ – a short review
Iraq in the Shadow of Khomeinism – Part III: Iraq is NOT Iran!
