The Wall Street Journal
AN IMPORTANT ARTICLE
The radical Sunni militia that has plunged Iraq into chaos bragged on Sunday that it had executed hundreds of Shiite Iraqi soldiers, even as the Obama administration said it is preparing to open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents.
The U.S.-Iran dialogue, which is expected to begin this week, will mark the latest in a rapid move toward rapprochement between Washington and Tehran over the past year. It also comes as the U.S. and other world powers try to reach an agreement with Iran by late July to curb its nuclear program.
The U.S. and Iran have publicly committed in recent days to provide military support if requested to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and help his government repel an offensive the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, has launched against Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities over the past week.
The U.S. over the weekend repositioned military equipment throughout the region and sent an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf as President Barack Obama awaited options for possible military action.
As the U.S. and Iran prepare for talks on the declining situation in Iraq, experts say that Washington should not engage with terrorist organizations. The WSJ's Deborah Kan speaks to Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The U.S. also beefed up security at its embassy in Baghdad and shifted some personnel elsewhere in the country.
Iraqi officials said on Sunday that ISIS had taken control of Tal Afar in northwest Iraq, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces once fought. The U.S. had hailed the city as a model of its "clear, hold and build" strategy in Iraq.
The possible depth of the ISIS threat became clearer on Sunday when photos were posted on a Twitter TWTR +0.30% account associated with ISIS claiming to show Sunni militants carrying out a mass execution of captured Iraqi Shiite soldiers, raising the prospect of a broader sectarian war in Iraq.
The photographs, accompanied by captions boasting that as many as 1,700 soldiers had been executed, underscored the mounting sectarian animosity fueling the fighting between Sunni extremists and Mr. Maliki's Shiite-dominated government.
The photographs appear to show dozens of men in civilian clothes in captivity. Captions on the photos describe say the men were being taken away to their deaths.
In one image, men are shown being transported in trucks. Another image shows armed men wearing black ISIS bandanas pointing their guns toward a clutch of men lying face down in ditch. Still another shows the same men with bloody wounds to their heads.
If the claim of carrying out mass executions in Iraq is true, pressure could increase on Shiites to retaliate, raising the prospect of a wave of reprisal killings reminiscent of the bloodshed that convulsed Iraq in the years following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
While the photographs were posted on a Twitter account associated with ISIS, neither the alleged death toll nor the identity of the purported victims could be verified independently.
But Ahmed Abdullah Al Jibouri, the governor of Salah Al Din province, where the mass atrocity supposedly took place, said that ISIS had captured "hundreds" of Iraqi military personnel and Air Force Academy students and is believed to have executed them.
Mr. Jibouri said that the exact number of dead was unknown, since government officials have been unable to reach the alleged sites of the massacre.
In Washington, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the U.S. couldn't confirm reports of the massacres but called the claim by ISIS "horrifying and a true depiction of the blood lust that these terrorists represent."
U.S. officials said it is imperative for Washington to discuss the security situation in Iraq with Iran and other regional powers in a bid to better coordinate a response against ISIS.
Secretary of State John Kerry communicated Washington's strategy to his Iraqi counterpart, Hoshyar Zebari, in a phone call on Saturday, according to the State Department.
Iranian President Hasan Rouhani said on Saturday that his government was open to cooperating with the U.S. in Iraq and that he exchanged letters with President Obama.
The Islamic militant group that seized much of northern Iraq posted photos that appear to show its fighters executing captured Iraqi soldiers. Associated Press
"When the U.S. takes action, then one can think about cooperation," Mr. Rouhani said at a news conference in Tehran. "Until today, no specific request for help has been demanded. But we are ready to help within international law."
The U.S. officials said it wasn't certain yet which diplomatic channel the Obama administration would use to discuss the Iraq situation.
One avenue could be through Vienna, where senior American and Iranian diplomats will convene starting Monday as part of international negotiations aimed at reaching a comprehensive agreement to curb Tehran's nuclear capabilities.
Iran's chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif, served as a key interlocutor between Iran and the George W. Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, said U.S. officials.
Both countries at the time sought to remove the Taliban, a Sunni extremist group, from power in Afghanistan and install President Hamid Karzai.
"Whatever dialogue may or may not be taking place [with Iran] would take place on the sideline or outside the mainstream of the nuclear talks" in Vienna, Mr. Kerry said Saturday in London. "We don't want that linked and mixed."
American and Iranian officials over the past year have used a series of bilateral channels—many in secret—to discuss the nuclear issue. Last week, senior White House and State Department officials met their Iranian counterparts in Geneva but didn't discuss the Iraq crisis, according to U.S. officials.
The White House's engagement with Iran on Iraq offers both opportunities and risks, said U.S. defense officials and Arab diplomats.
Iran, a majority Shiite country, has served as Mr. Maliki's closest Mideast ally and has mobilized Tehran's military and religious establishment to support their coreligionists in Iraq in recent days. Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has an extensive presence inside Iraq, said U.S. officials, and has trained Shiite militias that have joined the Iraqi army in fighting ISIS.
U.S. officials say the IRGC trained many of the largest Shiite militias going back to the Iraq war and maintain contacts. These include the Mahdi Army, Kata'ib Hezbollah, and Asab Ahl al-Haq.
Iran has publicly denied sending forces to fight in Iraq and has said it would give Iran military assistance if Iraq asked.
Even some of Mr. Obama's harshest critics in Washington voiced support on Sunday for coordinating the U.S.'s military response in Iraq with Tehran's. They argued that ISIS poses a much greater near-term threat to the U.S.'s national-security interests than does Iran.
"Why did we deal with Stalin? Because he was not as bad as Hitler," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Sunday on CNN. "The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn't fall."
A number of U.S. defense officials, however, said Iran has a drastically different vision for Iraq than does the U.S. The Iranian government has also supported Mr. Maliki's policies of marginalizing Iraq's minority Sunni population politically and economically, which has fueled support for the ISIS's military operations in the Sunni regions of Iraq.
Any U.S. military campaign in Iraq that is seen as allied with Iran's and the Shiite majority's risks further polarizing the country, said these officials. It could also alienate Washington's allies in Sunni-dominated countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan.
"This is a case where the enemy of our enemy is still our enemy," said a U.S. defense official who has worked extensively in Iraq. "Any shared interests in Iraq are limited."
U.S. allies in Israel and the Middle East are also concerned that any cooperation between Washington and Tehran on Iraq could complicate the nuclear negotiations.
The Obama administration and its diplomatic partners in the United Nations Security Council have set a July 20 deadline to reach an agreement limiting Iran's nuclear capabilities.
But U.S. and European diplomats have warned that the gaps between Washington's and Tehran's negotiating positions remain wide, raising serious doubts that an agreement can be reached by July.
Mr. Rouhani took a hard-line position on the nuclear issue during his Saturday news conference. He said Tehran wouldn't significantly reduce its capacity to produce nuclear fuel through the enrichment of uranium—a key Western demand. And he argued that the U.S.'s sanctions against Iran over the nuclear issue are starting to fray.
"During the nuclear negotiations we have displayed our strong commitment to diplomacy," Mr. Rouhani said. "If a deal can't be reached by July 20, conditions will never be like the past. The sanctions regime has been broken."
Israeli and Arab officials have voiced concern that the U.S. won't be able to maintain a tough line on the nuclear issue if its cooperating with Tehran in Iraq. Senior administration officials have denied this.
In Iranian political circles, momentum is building about the prospect of Iran cooperating with the U.S. to contain the threat of al Qaeda reaching Iran's borders, said several Iranian diplomats and politicians.
"Some of us realize that is the best opportunity for Iran to improve its diplomatic relations with the U.S.," said a prominent politician in Tehran close to the government.
During the Iraq war, the two sides occasionally discussed security interests, but through intermediaries such as Kurds.
The current diplomatic climate may be ripe for Iran to openly engage with the U.S. and use it as an opening for normalizing relations.
A key factor is that the taboo of direct dialogue with the Americans was broken when Messrs. Obama and Rouhani spoke on the phone during the U.N. General Assembly in New York last fall. Senior American and Iranian diplomats have an open communication channel under the umbrella of the continuing nuclear negotiations between Iran and world powers.
The intelligence data gathered by Iran's elite Quds Force, the overseas branch of the IRGC present in both Syria and Iraq, would be valuable to the U.S. if it chose to take action against ISIS.
"Iran and the U.S. are the only two countries with the power to end Iraq's crisis in a peaceful way," tweeted Hamid Aboutalebi, a top political adviser of Mr. Rouhani, on Sunday.
For Iran, the incentive to cooperate with the U.S. on Iraq goes further than just a desire to improve relations with the U.S., many observers say. ISIS is one of the biggest security threats Iran has faced since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, establishing military bases across the Islamic Republic's borders.
"Iran is definitely willing to cooperate with the U.S. over Iraq because the threat it's facing is one of existential national security," said Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst close to the government, in a phone interview from Tehran.
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