January 2020. Early Sunday morning, Sarkawt Shams, a Kurdish member of the Iraqi parliament, received a text on his phone from the political bureau of the Kataib Hezbollah militia, which had just lost its leader to a U.S. drone strike. The parliament was due to vote on whether to expel U.S. troops from Iraq following the U.S. assassination of the Shiite militia leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, and his ally Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani early Friday morning. The text Shams received was an unmistakable and personal threat: Vote to oust the Americans or else. “They were saying either you are going to side with the people or you will be considered traitors and your houses will be burned,” Shams said. Shams ultimately stayed away, along with at least 150 other legislators who boycotted the vote. But inside the parliament, the atmosphere resembled a political rally, with lawmakers chanting, “Yes, yes Suleimani. No, no America.” The irony is that until U.S. President Donald Trump violated Iraqi sovereignty by killing Suleimani and Muhandis with a drone strike on Jan. 3, Iran faced a serious threat to its influence inside Iraq in the form of thousands of Iraqis protesting against the corrupt politicians propped up by Tehran, often through Suleimani’s machinations. The Iraqi protests had posed the greatest challenge to Iran’s influence over Iraq in years. Mass outrage was mounting against leading politicians whom demonstrators accused of serving Iran before they served Iraq. And so Suleimani may now be closer to achieving in death what he was unable to produce in life: a countermovement to the demonstrations, one that pivots Iraq back toward Iran and solidifies its political establishment. Suleimani’s assassination by the Americans has provided a much-needed shot of legitimacy to Iraq’s unpopular—and Shiite-dominated—leadership, who have not only close links to Iran but also a vested interest in suppressing the domestic popular movement against them. “I think the assassination has given the Iran-aligned elements in the Iraqi government and the Iraqi political system what they’ve been looking for since October, namely a counter-cause, a counter-protest, and a way of creating counter-pressure to push back against the protests,” said Fanar Haddad, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Institute think tank. Renad Mansour, a research fellow at Chatham House, another think tank, believes that in the coming days many of the pro-Iranian groups will try to use any new U.S. airstrikes to fuel anti-American sentiment. Many of the mostly youthful protesters were raised in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion and have made clear that they support neither the United States nor Iran, but that does not stop them from being branded with a pro-American brush. “There will be a purge I think—this is the biggest threat—of anti-establishment protesters or leaders and now they have the ammunition of using anti-Americanism,” Mansour said. “So anyone who is critical of them they can just say is an American spy.”
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