Iraq is Now an Iranian Satrapy

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Telegraph-Journal

George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime to bring “democracy” to that country not only failed, but threw it into the hands of Iran. It is now basically a puppet state run by Tehran’s allies.

Since then, Iraq has undergone a long period of instability, with armed groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State taking advantage of the power vacuum left by the disbandment of the military and the ban on the Baath party. In 2014, the Islamic State advanced into Iraq from Syria and took over parts of Anbar province. Regional forces, including as many as thirty thousand Iranian troops, along with the Iraqi army, local tribes, and the Kurdish Peshmerga engaged in operations to retake territory from the Islamic State, finally emerging victorious in 2017.

But in a situation that captures the tragedy of Iraq’s modern political life, ballot boxes still don’t reflect the will of the people. They have instead become a legal facade for an Iran-backed project designed to perpetuate Iraq’s fragmentation by channeling political, economic, and security resources toward Iran-aligned militias and political actors, consolidating their power at the expense of the Iraqi state.

As the leading force of the Shia Muslim world, Tehran has long sought influence in majority-Shia Iraq, home to both Shia Islam’s most sacred sites and the seminaries that honed the Islamic Republic’s religious leaders.

A coalition of parties led by Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr won a surprise victory in Iraq’s May 2018 parliamentary election. His Shiite bloc has historically remained at odds with Iranian-backed groups in Iraq. Following the 2021 election, however, his coalition disintegrated, and pro-Iranian militias gained power. The premiership was handed to Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, a long-time ally of Iran.

On Nov. 11, 2025, Iraq held its sixth parliamentary elections since the 2003 regime change. They unfolded against a backdrop of persistent sectarian divisions, economic challenges, and competing regional influences.

With around 7,744 candidates and 75 lists on the ballot, most parties ran with ideologically incoherent electoral lists centered on prominent-- though not necessarily popular-- figures and assorted hanger-on candidates. These lists were not designed to articulate a shared program but to gather as many votes as possible from disparate constituencies.

The elections produced a fragmented parliament reflecting Iraq’s ethno-sectarian composition. Prime Minister al-Sudani and his newly established party, Reconstruction and Development, secured the largest bloc with 46 seats out of 329. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law party obtained 28 seats, while former Speaker of Parliament Muhammad al-Halbusi’s Progress party won 27 seats. The League of the Righteous militia, headed by Qais al-Khazali, also secured 27 seats, underscoring the continued political influence of armed groups. Al-Sudani won in eight of ten Shia-majority provinces, including a decisive victory in Baghdad.

The so-called Shia House, despite its collective 197-seat majority, is deeply fragmented into competing factions. Four major groupings can be identified within the bloc: first, the explicitly pro-Iranian militia parties, controlling 51 seats and representing groups with direct organizational and ideological ties to Tehran; second, al-Sudani and aligned minor parties, commanding approximately 70 seats and representing a more nationalist, development-oriented orientation; third, al-Maliki’s faction with 28 seats, occupying a position closer to the Iranian pole than al-Sudani but less subordinate than the militia parties; and fourth, the so-called “Tishreenis,” which refers to the month of October 2019, in which popular protests against the government erupted. This last grouping has now been eliminated from parliamentary representation.

The government is now in the hands of the Shia Coordination Framework, a coalition of Shia parties; it is the political umbrella that brings together the parliamentary arms of Iran-aligned militia, and underscores the breadth of their influence inside parliament. Ali Al-Zaidi was named prime minister April 27 by the Coordination Framework, after former two-time Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had emerged as the coalition’s initial candidate.

These Shia warlords hold formal roles in parliament, but they also control militia forces and security institutions, enabling them to translate their battlefield power into political leverage. This reflects how deeply armed groups have embedded themselves at the core of the legislative process. With dozens of militia affiliates entering parliament, the prospects for a civilian state diminish.

Over the course of the Israel-Hamas War, Iran-backed militia groups have targeted American troops in the region over 165 times. The remaining 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq have been subject to consistent attacks on their bases. This has become more pronounced since Washington’s attacks on Iran began in late February.

Unfortunately for the U.S., these Iran-backed Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), as they are known, are larger and better financed than Iraq’s actual army. Iran’s regime has provided them with advanced weaponry, and they have mounted sophisticated attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure inside America’s closest allies in the war, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Iran’s Iraqi allies are valuable, not just with military assistance, but also by providing billions of dollars in cash to Iran from Iraq’s oil revenues.

The United States identified seven leaders of the PMF on April 17 as terrorists, asserting that they operate with near impunity, attacking U.S. personnel and innocent civilians across Iraq. Washington also demanded that its nominal ally, Iraq, sever ties with Tehran. This of course won’t happen.

 

 

Lessons from the Holocaust for Today

 By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

On April 12, I spoke at our annual Yom Hashoah memorial ceremony in Charlottetown. The last time I did so was in April 1976, in Montreal. It was, for Canadian Jews, a completely different time. Montreal was still the first city of Canadian Jewry, with Toronto a distant second. Israel seemed a secure country, having won a hard-fought victory three years earlier in the Yom Kippur War.

There were clouds gathering, true – after all the UN General Assembly had passed the “Zionism is a form of racism” the previous December, and a powerful Communist bloc led by the Soviet Union was still a formidable enemy.

Today, Jewish life has become far more precarious. Two things are essential for an anti-democratic political movement to succeed: ideological justification by academics and intellectuals, and control of the streets by violent mobs. Since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, we have seen both.

At McGill University in Montreal, a March 21 referendum by the Law Students’ Association (LSA) supported amending the group’s constitution to boycott Israeli academic bodies, though it was deemed illegitimate by the university’s president. Similar actions are taking place across Canada. Indeed, at Vanier College, a Montreal CEGEP,  it abruptly cancelled its Holocaust commemoration on March 25 because it didn’t think it could keep guests and the college community safe.

Unfortunately, we know a terrible precedent for this union of the intellectuals and the mob. Nazi ideology, too, was not formulated by street thugs. Historian Max Weinreich published his book Hitler’s Professors in 1946, noting that German scholarship provided the ideas and techniques that led to and justified unparalleled slaughter. All too many Nazi war criminals were holders of PhDs. 

As historian Niall Ferguson reminds us, in an article published in the New York Free Press of Dec. 11, 2023, “Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich.” The “final solution of the Jewish question” began, he has written, with words -- “to be precise, it began as lectures and monographs and scholarly articles.”

The American writer Vivian Gornick, reviewing a book, “Turning a Blind Eye, A memoir of daily accommodation to fascism,” by the German historian Joachim Fest, about Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s (before the Holocaust), quotes this passage:

“Everyone sees that life for the Jews is gradually shutting down. Take their neighbor and good friend, Dr. Meyer: one day he can no longer subscribe to newspapers and magazines; another, he has to hand in his bicycle and typewriter; another, he can no longer keep a pet or buy flowers. Then all the Jews simply start disappearing from the neighborhood.” The Nazi march to power literally begins with shutting Jews out of public life while using academia as the heavy hand of indoctrination.

 Is this slowly happening to Jews in Canada today, as they are pushed out of or refused admittance to cultural events, colleges, universities, and graduate schools, academic university positions, publishing, music, theatre, and so on?  In “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” By Jesse Brown, Atlantic, March 24, 2026, he writes: “Is a national tolerance for zealotry purging Jews from public life?”  Jewish life in Canada may have “forever changed,” he argues. “I can no longer take for granted that people like me are represented in Canada’s hospitals, schools, newsrooms, and legislatures.”

We may see the quiet withdrawal of Jews from Canadian society “without any glass or bones being broken,” simply because the evidence that they are no longer welcome has become overwhelming. Another writer calls it the social and academic “shtetelization” of Western Jewry.

We even face obstruction from the Canadian government. In just the last two years, eight explicitly Jewish non-profit charities, including the Jewish National Fund, have been stripped of their ability to collect tax-deductible donations by the Canada Revenue Agency -- often amid pressure campaigns from anti-Israel activists. The delisting was also celebrated by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), the union representing CRA workers.

We now witness continuous large “pro-Palestinian” rallies through our cities, invasions of shopping malls and thoroughfares, including intimidating behaviour against Jewish passersby. Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. 

And these events are not just “political protests.” At an al-Quds rally in Toronto March 14, protesters held signs that showed rats crawling out of a Star of David, depicting a Jewish man as a goblin-like creature emerging from a cave, and showing a Jewish man as a hook-nosed caricature.

Three Jewish synagogues in Toronto were hit with gunfire in one week in March. After every such incident, we hear that “antisemitism has no place in Canada.” But if that were true, synagogues would not require concrete barriers. Jewish schools would not need armed security. Community institutions would not conduct threat assessments before hosting events. Yet big city mayors like Toronto’s Olivia Chow don’t seem, to put it diplomatically, be losing much sleep over what’s going on in their cities.

The attacks on Jews, including physical assaults and social media campaigns, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks. In fact people have been attacked on the street for speaking Hebrew. 

If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.

We may be returning to a time that we thought was long behind us. And we are less prepared for it than our forebearers were, because they were used to living in a semi-segregated world, and expected less from the larger society. As large swaths of the Jewish community are beginning to retreat inward, the greater long-term fear is the collapse of Jewish life here altogether.