Iran has a dual strategy in Iraq of providing military aid to Iraqi militia while at the same time giving political support to Iraqi political parties, a new report details.

In “Iranian Strategy in Iraq: Politics and ‘Other Means,’” a comprehensive report released by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point on October 13, Col. Joseph Felter, a Special Forces veteran and national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and co-author Brian Fishman, director of research at the Combating Terrorism Center, discuss Iran’s covert operations in Iraq from before the U.S.-led invasion right up to the present. The authors, who spent the summer of 2008 in Iraq, draw on 85 newly released documents—summaries of interviews with captured Iraqi militia members—that show the Iranian military trains Iraqi Shiite militants to fight U.S. forces. They also draw on pre-2003 internal Iraqi intelligence reports, never before released to the public, and other data.

The report asserts that Iran has a “robust policy” to exert influence in Iraq in order to limit American power in the Middle East, ensure Iraq does not pose a threat to Iran, and build a base for projecting influence further abroad. “… Iran’s actions are part of a deliberate, strategic policy to increase its power and influence in Iraq and throughout the region,” writes Michael J. Meese, a professor at the West Point U.S. Military Academy, in the preface to the report.

The primary way Tehran is influencing Iraq, the report states, is through leveraging its close historical association with Iraqi Shiite political organizations, including the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the country’s most powerful Shiite movement. “They have influence in the Iraqi political system to a remarkable degree,” Felter said. “They’ve really got their hooks in.”

Second, says the report, Iran uses the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force to provide paramilitary training and weapons to various Iraqi terrorist groups. Iran also projects influence through economic initiatives, religious programs and various social levers.

While some of Iran’s influence may be constructive, the report states, “Nonetheless, Iranian policy in Iraq is also duplicitous. Iran publicly calls for stability while subverting Iraq’s government and illegally sponsoring anti‐government militias.”

Iran’s two-pronged strategy—political influence and militia support—afford Iran a distinct advantage. The report states:

The two‐tracked strategy offered Iran unique levers to increase violence in Iraq and then to benefit when violence subsided. Another advantage has been that, intentionally or not, Iran’s two‐pronged approach obscured the importance of Iran’s political influence in Iraq by focusing the international media and U.S. policymakers on Iran’s lethal aid to militia groups.

Iran’s political strategy is particularly important right now because of the U.S.‐Iraqi negotiations on a Status of Forces Agreement (sofa) and a Strategic Framework Agreement (sfa), which will govern the role of U.S. forces in Iraq after the end of this year. The report outlines how Iran has recently worked to reduce the level of violence in Iraq while concentrating on a political campaign to shape the sfa and sofa agreement to its strategic ends. Iran likely is using supportive Iraqi politicians to influence the negotiations “as a means to constrain U.S. freedom of action in Iraq over the long‐term, rather than increase violence now,” the report states.

The report concludes that

Iran has achieved three major accomplishments in Iraq. First, the unstable security situation and political opposition means the U.S. is not in a position to use Iraq as a platform for targeting Iran. Second, Iran’s political allies have secured high‐ranking positions in the Iraqi government. Third, the Iraqi Constitution calls for a highly federalized state. Iran values a decentralized Iraq because it will be less capable of projecting power, and because Iran is primarily concerned with Iraq’s southern, oil‐rich, Shia‐dominated provinces. Iran believes that increased southern autonomy will leave those provinces more open to Iranian influence.

That Iran is heavily involved in Iraq is nothing new, of course—though this 90-page report—and the 547 pages of documents accompanying it—provides additional evidence of Iran’s strategy and success. For years, evidence has continued to emerge of Iran’s infiltration of Iraq. This is something the Trumpet has written about since 1994 in fact.

The significance, as far as Bible prophecy goes, is dual: America’s lack of decisive, effective action to halt Iran’s covert war against it points to a lack of national will, a condition the Bible says the end-time nations of biblical Israel would be cursed with (Leviticus 26:19). Secondly, Iran’s actions, motives and goals in Iraq demonstrate its ascendancy to become the biblical “king of the south” (Daniel 11:40).

For more on the significance of Iran’s actions in Iraq, read “Is Iraq About to Fall to Iran?”