SpaceWar.com - Your World At War
Iraq likely theater if US, Iran tensions worsen: study
Washington, Jan 16 (AFP) Jan 16, 2019
Iraq could bear the brunt if conflict intensifies between Iran and the United States, a think-tank study said Wednesday.

The International Crisis Group, which researches ways to prevent war, interviewed officials around the world including Iran for an extensive report on the state of the 2015 denuclearization accord between Tehran and major powers.

President Donald Trump has withdrawn the United States and ramped up economic pressure aimed at isolating Iran, although Europeans still back the accord negotiated under former president Barack Obama.

The International Crisis Group said that Iran would likely continue to comply with the deal, seeing itself as holding the moral high ground and capable of waiting out Trump, who faces re-election next year.

But the study said that Tehran's calculations could change if its oil exports, which stood at 3.8 million barrels a day in 2017, fall below 700,000, a level that could trigger hyper-inflation and intensify domestic protests which for now appear manageable.

If Iran decides to retaliate against the United States, the report said that Tehran may find its most attractive option to be to employ its proxies around the Middle East, a path that would be murky enough to avoid a strong European reaction.

The report quoted a senior Iranian national security official as saying that the likeliest theater was Iraq, where militias from the Shiite majority have close ties with Tehran.

"Iraq is where we have experience, plausible deniability and the requisite capability to hit the US below the threshold that would prompt a direct retaliation," the official was quoted as saying.

Iran is also deeply involved in Syria and Lebanon, but the two countries are especially fragile and Tehran could lose its gains, the official said.

Iran has limited assets in Afghanistan, while stepping up support for Huthi rebels in Yemen would hurt regional rival Saudi Arabia more than the United States, the official said.

The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that Trump's hawkish national security adviser, John Bolton, asked for military options to strike Iran after an Iranian-linked group launched a mortar attack in Spetember on Baghdad's "Green Zone," the protected area where the US embassy is located. The US says its embassy was the target.

No one was hurt and demonstrators also ransacked the Iranian consulate in Basra during the wave of protests over economic conditions in Iraq.


ADVERTISEMENT




Space News from SpaceDaily.com
Axiom-4 mission launch scrubbed as SpaceX detects leak in Falcon 9 rocket
NASA Mars Orbiter Captures Volcano Peeking Above Morning Cloud Tops
Physicists observe a new form of magnetism for the first time

24/7 Energy News Coverage
UK pumps 14 bn pounds into nuclear plant on path to net zero
Rolls-Royce to build U.K.'s first small modular reactors
'Applied AI' set to dominate France's Vivatech trade fair

Military Space News, Nuclear Weapons, Missile Defense
China testing orbital refueling procedures for satellite missions
York preps first Dragoon Mission for Missile Warning and Warfighter Connectivity constellation
South Korea in 'final stages' to sign major tank deal with Poland

24/7 News Coverage
US restores some medical research grants, says top Trump official
NASA's Ready-to-Use Dataset Details Land Motion Across North America
BlackSky Gen-3 delivers very hi-res imagery at warfighting speed - 12 hours after launch



All rights reserved. Copyright Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.