Military analysts and Middle East experts have spent years warning about the growing influence of Iran in Iraq. A group of Texas National Guardsmen watched it firsthand.

As one of the last U.S. units to deploy to Iraq, the Texas Army Guardsmen told congressional lawmakers in late November the Iraqi army still struggles to disseminate intelligence and manage logistics, leaving their soldiers vulnerable to outside influence. Iraqi soldiers spend weeks by themselves, without supplies or relief, on posts dispersed across the Iran-Iraq border.

“The malign influence that exists there now will probably continue to be there after the U.S. military leaves,” said Army Maj. Gen. Eddy Spurglin, head of the 36th Infantry Division, who headed the Texas Guardsmen that returned this summer.

Spurgin and his soldiers didn’t witness the kinds of brash power plays that Iran’s military leadership has made in the past two weeks – naval exercises near the Strait of Hormuz, and warning that a U.S. aircraft carrier must never return to the Persian Gulf.

Iran has threatened to close the Strait in the past, and Pentagon officials vowed again Tuesday that U.S. Navy warships will continue their deployments. But this year, for the first time since 2003, the U.S. no longer has soldiers on the ground in Iraq to stem Iran’s influence there.

With the Iranian-backed Shia Dawa party controlling much of Baghdad and southern Iraq, Spurgin’s unit of 700 Guardsmen witnessed the small pieces of economic and political influence affecting the Iraqi government and army.

For example, Army Brig. Gen. William Smith, 36th Infantry’s deputy commander, said he worried the Iraqi army’s shaky logistics system would open up doors for Iranian agents to gain favor inside army operations.

Iraq’s supply chain still works on a paper system that depends on approvals from officers as senior as generals for supplies as basic as tires. That’s in addition to the reality that Iraq has no system in place to deliver supplies to units in the field from the country’s only depots, located at Taji.

So if an Iraqi army unit needs tires for Humvees in Basrah, for example, that unit must travel all the way to Taji to pick them up. Of course, it’s rare for a unit commander to approve such a trip because it shows he’s failed as a leader if his unit needs new tires, Smith explained.

“It’s part of the military culture we’re trying to change over there,” he said.

If soldiers can’t depend on their army to supply them, they must look elsewhere. In many cases, they turn to supplies smuggled over the Iran border.

Those smuggling efforts included the ingredients to build improvised explosive devices. Iran’s special operations unit, known as the Quds Force, trained many of the Iraq militia members who execute the smuggling operations inside Iraq, Spurgin said.

The Texas soldiers didn’t focus solely on advanced military operations out of Iran. In a briefing to a Texas congressional delegation on Capitol Hill, the Guardsmen explained how something as simple as groceries allows Iran’s government to gain power in Iraq.

Iran is flooding Iraq’s markets with goods at much cheaper prices than other imports, leading other countries’ suppliers, in places such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, to not bother to sell in Iraq. Those supplies allow Iran to control southern Iraq’s markets and thus its stomachs.

“It really means more than you might think,” Smith told Republican Rep. Mike Conaway, a member of the Armed Services Committee. “It’s really going to be a big problem for them in the future.”

The Iraqi army also continues to struggle to set up its intelligence network, Spurgin said. The soldiers don’t have an effective, decentralized system to spread information securely and efficiently across the country.

When asked by Conaway if the Iraqis could protect their borders from an external threat such as Iran, he bluntly said no. Spurgin told the congressman the Iraqis could not defend against an invading force.

“Operationally, the Iraqi Army has the ability to provide internal security of their own country, but they’re not ready to defend their country from an external threat,” Spurgin said.

 

Articolul original: aici