Tehran Is Quietly Making Its Agenda Heard in Iraq

As U.S. troops were helping to pull down a towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad last month, a group of fighters on a military base just across the border in Iran was assembled and given its next mission:

Infiltrate Iraq and spread pro-Iranian ideas.

The men were Iraqi exiles who belong to the Badr Brigade, an Iranian-backed militia that is part of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They were told to shave off their beards and change into civilian clothing. Their Iranian documents were taken away, and each one was given a forged Iraqi identification.

Then they were put on buses and shuttled into Iraq.

“They told us our task will be to teach our families Shiite teachings,” said Emad Hussein Ali Safi, a member of the Badr Brigade for 11 years who gave a detailed account of his years in Iran and his final orders before returning to Baghdad. “They spoke about a Shiite state. They said Iran should be Iraq’s reference, its symbol.”

The Supreme Council, which has been based in Tehran for more than two decades, all the while supported and funded by the Iranian government, is vying for a role in postwar Iraq. Its leader, Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, crossed the border back into Iraq early today.

Iran’s influence over the Supreme Council is just one way the Islamic Republic has taken steps to become a significant force in Iraq. Operating behind the scenes, Iran is an invisible hand pushing its agenda, quietly but effectively making its case house by house.

Although the government of Iran no longer has a formal policy to export its Islamic Revolution, hard-liners still control the country, and religious institutions have a profound influence there. And the hard-liners’ goal still is to see their brand of Shiite governance spread to Iraq and beyond.

And a key obstacle in Iraq has been removed: When Hussein was ousted, his security services -- which counted Iran as their main enemy -- also collapsed. With the exception of U.S. troops, already spread thin, and threats emanating from Washington, there is no strong countervailing force to any covert efforts Iran might undertake.

The United States has warned Iran not to meddle in Iraq’s internal affairs. Two weeks ago, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the Bush administration had “made clear to Iran that we would oppose any outside organization’s interference in Iraq.”

Washington also is concerned that Iran, which the U.S. asserts has long supported terrorism, could export those destabilizing elements to its neighbor.

Testifying before the House in March, J. Cofer Black, the State Department’s top counter-terrorism official, said the Bush administration “has looked upon Iran as a serious threat to the United States, as one of, if not the, primary terrorist threat with capabilities to match.”

Iran is influencing Iraq’s internal dynamics in many ways, from fatwas, or religious edicts, calling on the Shiite majority to seize the day, to religious students returning and opening their own mosques after years of study in Iran.

Safi, for example, was one of an estimated 15,000 members of the Badr Brigade who have returned to Iraq. He said he and his colleagues underwent years of intense religious and political indoctrination in Iran and that he has no doubt that many brigade members are following their orders.

“A lot of them take this very seriously,” said Safi, 50, a Sunni Muslim who said he joined the brigade so he could get out of an Iranian prisoner of war camp. “This is their task now, to spread Iranian ideas.”

Many thousands of Iraqis had fled to Iran over the years, some seeking escape from religious persecution, others exiled for political reasons. Thousands have now returned and, whether under orders or out of conviction, bring with them a strong affinity for an Iranian-style Islamic theocracy.

Sheik Kriadh Karashi fled Iraq in 1997 when security police tried to arrest him. He slipped out a window in his house and made it to Iran, where he said he received a salary to study religion. He returned after the regime fell and has opened a mosque in his neighborhood in west Baghdad.

He said that some religious students studying in Iraq continue to receive salaries from Iranian sources.

At the same time, Iran is for the first time able to broadcast its Arabic-language television and radio shows into Iraq without them being jammed, and in many homes it is the only television that can be received. The news content is often anti-American.

“The people of Iraq should determine their next government,” a political analyst said on a recent program. “The Shiites were oppressed before.... It is their right to demonstrate that the U.S. Army should leave now that they have finished their task.”

Iran has been working to spread its theological ideas to Iraq from the earliest days, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini shocked the world with his rise to power in 1979. Although the majority of Muslims belong to the Sunni branch of Islam, in Iran, a Persian state, and Iraq, a primarily Arab nation, the majorities are Shiite.

Nevertheless, Iran and Iraq were bitter enemies, with Hussein’s Sunni-led government going to war against Iran in 1980. The fighting lasted eight years, ending in a stalemate after more than 1 million men were killed.

Now that Hussein is gone, Shiites have moved quickly and aggressively to grab power. With other internal groups slow to fill the power vacuum, and the United States ponderous in its nation-building effort, Shiite religious leaders are trying to provide government-style services, from health care to protection.

Iraqi intelligence and security documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times indicate that Hussein’s intelligence service was monitoring a network of Iranian operatives in Iraq that developed financial and logistical links with the Shiite community. Through the use of paid informers, and informants pressured to aid the security services, Iraqi intelligence officers reported uncovering activities ranging from a plot by Iranians to kill the head of a local security office to an effort to have posters of a religious leader circulated in the south, the documents said.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times before he turned himself in to U.S. forces last month, Iraq’s head of military intelligence, Zuhayr Naqib, said Hussein’s regime generally considered Iran -- not the U.S. -- the greatest threat to its stability.

“Before the American buildup, there was Iran,” he said, referring to the massing of U.S. troops before the war. “They interfere with Iraqi affairs -- Iran wants an Islamic government, and even their media is talking about Iraq, that it should have an Islamic government.”

Safi’s accounts of his time in Iran, and his years with the Badr Brigade, give an indication of how Iran has taken the long view, hoping over time to spread its ways into Iraq.

Safi was 32 when he was called up from the Iraqi army reserves to fight in the war against Iran. He left for the front when his son, Mohammed, was 1 1/2.

On July 1, 1986, he said, he was fighting from a trench in the Mahran front when his unit was surrounded. He said that 1,200 soldiers were killed and that he and the rest were taken prisoner. Details of Safi’s account were confirmed by his family in Baghdad and the new family that he formed years later in the Iranian Shiite holy city of Mashad.

Safi said that he was held in an underground prison for a short time, then turned over to a POW camp. He said he stayed there for 5 1/2 years, enduring harsh treatment and shortages of food. Every day and all day, he said, he was forced to listen to religious and theological speeches.

Then one day the government gave him a choice: He could stay a POW or join the Badr Brigade, a practice confirmed by Adel Abdul Mahdi, an advisor to Ayatollah Hakim. Safi signed a contract and was taken to the military camp. He said that half the day was devoted to military training and the other half to religious and political indoctrination.

“The influence of those lectures had more of an effect on the prisoners than the military practices,” he said, seated during an interview at his family’s home in Baghdad, with son Mohammed, now 19, nearby.

After a year at the military camp, he said, he was given a salary. Eventually, he bought some clothing, found a place to live and got married.

He and his new Iranian wife, Mah Nisa, had two children, Ali and Fatima. They moved to Mashad, and for 20 days every month, Safi went to serve at a military base. He said that he was an observation officer and that he worked with a group trained to fire Katyusha rockets.

He said that all of the members of the brigade were Iraqi but that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard set the agenda. “Of course, Iran had a huge influence,” he said.

Last month, Safi was on the base, watching on television as the statue of Hussein came down outside the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad. Until then, he said, Iranian troops massed on the border were on high alert and he thought that they might invade Iraq.

But at that moment, he said, the Iranians changed their minds. They said that the Americans and the British were too firmly in control. Instead, they decided to disguise their Iraqi emissaries and send them home. He said he received his orders from an officer, Abu Amar Mayahi.

“Our commander was Iraqi inside the brigade,” he said. “They took their orders from the Iranians.”

Safi held up the phony identification he said he received. It appears brand new, and while the date on it says it was issued in 1993, the photograph of Safi looks recent. It also says that he is from Basra, in the south, though he has never lived there.

“They collected all the soldiers,” Safi recalled, “and said, ‘You should not go into Iraq with any weapons.’ We all shaved our beards. They issued us Iraqi ID’s.”

When Safi entered Iraq, he did what he had been dreaming about for almost two decades: He left the brigade commanders and headed for home. He sent a note to his family members, and they drove 30 miles east of Baghdad, to Baqubah, where the bus had dropped him off.

He has since grown back his mustache and acquainted himself with his son. His first wife remarried five months ago. But now he finds himself once again on the wrong side of the border. Because the Iranians took his documents, he has no way to return to his new family. He figures that was the Iranians’ goal, so that the Badr Brigade people would become entrenched in Iraq.

But for him, it means not getting back to his Iranian wife and children. “Now,” he said, “it is as if the catastrophe has repeated itself.”