David Patrikarakos David Patrikarakos

Iran’s missile diplomacy

Tehran (photo: iStock)

It’s a time for delivering messages in the Middle East, where messages rarely come without their near constant attendant: violence. On Monday night a volley of rockets struck a base hosting US troops in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. International media reported that one rocket landed in the base and another on residential areas nearby; one civilian contractor was reportedly killed, and six others were wounded, including a US service member. At least five Iraqi civilians were also injured, with one in a critical condition.

The militia group Saraya Awliyah al-Dam has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack. The group remains, superficially at least, a mystery. It proclaims no overt allegiance and generally sticks to talking about kicking the US out of the Middle East and taking revenge for the 2020 US drone strikes against Iran’s most famous soldier, the Quds Force commander, Qasem Soleimani and Ab Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the Iraqi commander of the Popular Mobilisation Committee (a conglomeration of mostly Shia militia groups).

The truth is that it’s an Iranian front. According to Phillip Smyth, Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Saraya Awliyah al-Dam is part of a wider policy that Iran has been rolling out since 2019, using proxies to attack Iraqi logistics organisations (usually trucking lines), as well as doing the odd bit of extorting and intimidating the locals.

‘This is all about slow rollout signalling,’ he says. ‘They are saying to the US: “we can reach out and touch you wherever you are in Iraq.” Using a front group as opposed to one of their known Shia proxies is just another message. When they use their proxies, they have some form of plausible deniability. This is them saying this isn’t us at all when everyone knows it is: implausible plausible deniability, you might say.

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