Sinjar, Iraq: Iraqi Kurdish leader Massud Barzani announced the “liberation” of Sinjar from the Daesh group Friday in an assault backed by US-led air strikes that cut a key jihadist supply line with Syria.
The operation, led by the autonomous Kurdish region’s peshmerga forces, also involved fighters from the Yazidi minority, a local Kurdish-speaking community targeted in a brutal Daesh campaign of massacres, enslavement and rape.
The success of the campaign is the latest sign that Daesh, which won a series of victories in a stunningly rapid offensive in Iraq last year, is now on the defensive.
“I am here to announce the liberation of Sinjar,” Barzani, the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, told a news conference near the northern town.
Barzani’s remarks also made clear that political conflict over Sinjar would likely follow the military battle for the town.
“Sinjar was liberated by the blood of the peshmerga and became part of Kurdistan,” Barzani said.
Baghdad, which has long opposed Kurdistan’s desire to incorporate a swathe of disputed northern territory, is unlikely to welcome that.
Mahma Khalil, the local official responsible for the area, told AFP Friday evening: “The security situation is stable now in Sinjar.”
“All the (Daesh) gunmen escaped from Sinjar.”
Earlier in the day, hundreds of Kurdish fighters, dressed in camouflage uniforms and armed with assault rifles and machine guns, moved into the town on foot, an AFP journalist reported.
Carrying the Kurdish region’s flag, they firing in the air and shouted “Long live the peshmerga!” and “Long live Kurdistan!“
Inside Sinjar, many houses and shops, a petrol garage and the local government headquarters had been destroyed.
Burned out cars sat in the streets, while barrels apparently containing explosives had been left behind.
The huge task of clearing Sinjar of bombs planted by Daesh remains, and there is also the possibility of holdout jihadists, who have kept up attacks even after other areas in Iraq were said to have been retaken.
The regional security council said “peshmerga forces entered Sinjar town from all four directions to clear remaining (Daesh) terrorists from the area.”
Sinjar has been pounded by US-led air strikes and Kurdish artillery fire targeting Daesh positions, which sent massive columns of smoke drifting up from the town on Thursday.
The coalition carried out 36 strikes against jihadists in the Sinjar area on Wednesday and Thursday, and 15 more across the border in Al-Hol, where Syrian Kurdish forces and their Arab allies are battling Daesh.
In a rare admission Thursday, the Pentagon said US ground forces advising the Kurds on their offensive were close enough to the front to identify Daesh targets and call in strikes.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook told reporters most of the US-led coalition troops were behind the front lines working with Kurdish commanders.
But “there are some advisers who are on Sinjar mountain, assisting in the selection of air strike targets.”
“They’re not directly in the line of action, but they might be able to visibly see it,” he added.
On Thursday, Kurdish forces cut the key highway that links Daesh-held areas in Iraq and Syria.
“Sinjar sits astride Highway 47, which is a key and critical resupply route” for Daesh, said Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for the international operation against Daesh.
“By seizing Sinjar, we’ll be able to cut that line of communication, which we believe will constrict (Daesh’s) ability to resupply themselves, and is a critical first step in the eventual liberation of Mosul,” said Warren, referring to the jihadists’ main hub in Iraq.
Daesh overran Sinjar in August last year, forcing thousands of Yazidis to flee to the mountains overlooking the town, where they were trapped by the jihadists.
The United Nations has described the attack on the Yazidis as a possible genocide, and on Thursday the US Holocaust Memorial Museum echoed that assessment in a report detailing allegations of rape, torture and murder by Daesh against the minority.
Aiding the Yazidis, whose unique faith Daesh considers heretical, was one of Washington’s main justifications for starting its air campaign against the jihadists last year.
Iraq Kurd chief announces ‘liberation’ of Sinjar from Daesh
Iraq Kurd chief announces ‘liberation’ of Sinjar from Daesh
Of strikes and succession: How Iran’s ‘mosaic regime’ endures after Khamenei’s killing
- Experts say Iran’s dispersed power structure was built to withstand leadership decapitation and prolonged confrontation
- Succession uncertainty persists, but entrenched institutions and security networks keep the regime functioning
LONDON: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on Saturday along with much of the Iranian regime’s senior civilian and military leadership. But, thanks to Iran’s “mosaic” leadership structure, the regime itself is far from dead.
When Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died of natural causes in 1989, his successor, Khamenei, took office the very next day.
Now Khamenei is dead, killed along with dozens of members of his family and other senior Iranian leaders in a series of US and Israeli attacks on targets across Tehran. Days later, the succession question remains unanswered.
But this, experts suggest, does not mean that Iran is drifting rudderless in a power vacuum — or that cutting off the head will kill the snake.
“The Iranian regime is a system that was built to last,” said Dr Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
“It has constitutional provisions in place and deep contingency planning, with four or five names for each key role, and so there was a high level of preparedness for a leadership decapitation campaign.”
Contingencies for just such an eventuality, which were first put in place at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, “were stepped up after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Iranians assessed that there would be a long-lasting confrontation with Israel.
“And although the attacks that followed didn’t lead to a regional confrontation of the sort we are seeing now, the Iranians have been long preparing for this.”
This is what Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, specializing in international security affairs, characterized this week as “the mosaic regime.”
“Iran anticipated decapitation long before (the US operation) Epic Fury began,” he wrote on Substack.
“Under its ‘mosaic’ leadership defense doctrine, authority is dispersed into semi-autonomous cells across military, security, and political domains. Redundancy substitutes for hierarchy.”
Pape added: “Airpower kills leaders; it does not easily kill distributed function.”
This was reflected in comments from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, who said the regime had “prepared for these moments” and had “planned for all scenarios.”
Indeed, despite multiple attacks by Israel and the US on senior civilian and military leadership, the drones and missiles keep coming across the Arabian Gulf.
The Iranian state “can be best described as polymorphous,” said Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor of global thought and comparative philosophies at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Western media, he added, “has a skewed understanding of the political dynamics in Iran and there is also a political agenda behind the misrepresentations.
“The tragedy is that this false reality informs decisions. This is why we are facing this horrific war. Bad, ideological knowledge created bad, impulsive decisions.”
Within Iran, he said, “there are several institutions that compete with each other and are anchored quite firmly in networks permeating society.”
At the heart of the system is the supreme leader, who supervises the other branches of government, including elected bodies such as the presidency, the Assembly of Experts and the parliament.
“And then there are the security layers, the military (Artesh), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their underbellies — for instance the Basij units with their representation in every university, municipal council, large organizations and even the smallest villages of the country.”
In addition, “there are theological power centers in the Shiite-Islamic seminaries surrounding the holy sites in Mashhad and Qom.
“It is this polymorphic structure that explains why the Israel-US assassination campaign hasn’t disrupted the ability of Iran to govern the country, certainly for now.”
Sooner or later a new supreme leader will have to be appointed. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran lays down a precise process.
In theory, a serving leader designates his preferred successor, whose appointment after his death is subject to approval by the Assembly of Experts — a panel of 88 Islamic jurists.
The Assembly of Experts building in Qom was itself struck on Tuesday as regime clerics were gathering to elect a new supreme leader, according to local media. At the time of writing, it was not immediately clear who was inside. If confirmed, the attack is likely to delay the process further.
“I don’t know that a date has been set,” said RUSI’s Ozcelik. “I think the language being used is that it would be ‘in the near future.’
“But there will be security concerns around a physical meeting of key clerical figures that would certainly be on the radar of American and Israeli intelligence and, given the circumstances, I think the regime can continue to justify not a delay but a considered longer timeline.”
It remains unknown who, if anyone, Khamenei had designated as his successor. If he had not, it might fall to the Assembly of Experts to pick someone.
The field of candidates is larger than it once was. Under the original terms of the constitution, framed after the 1979 revolution, a supreme leader had to be chosen from among the pool of Grand Ayatollahs.
That changed when Ayatollah Khomeini’s original choice to succeed him, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, fell out of favor and was dropped from the succession after he began to publicly criticize some of the violent excesses of the regime.
The constitution was then amended, opening up the field of succession beyond the limited cohort of Grand Ayatollahs, which allowed Khomeini to designate Khamenei as his successor. The Assembly of Experts endorsed his choice on June 3, 1989.
In the meantime, Iran is being run, as dictated by the constitution, by a three-man council. The council, which was formed on Sunday, consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, and senior cleric Alireza Arafi.
In theory, these are the men that US President Donald Trump would be talking to should the US decide to reopen negotiations. However, Tuesday’s attack on the Presidential Office suggests no one in the regime is safe.
“I don’t know if these three are actually targets,” said Ozcelik. “Although I think that would be consistent with what we’ve seen from the Israelis’ point of view.
“But I’m not sure how helpful it would be to take out a figure such as President Pezeshkian, who in Iranian terms is a moderate, and a potential point of contact with whom Trump and his administration could have talks going forward.
“And whenever this concludes, there will need to be someone in Tehran who is able to pick up the phone when Trump calls.”
Who that might be right now is as much a question of who remains alive as anything else, said Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“I’m going to guess that the US would engage with those with whom they’ve engaged in the past, whether it’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, or possibly Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council,” she said.
“Those are, I think, the two key people I would highlight, which doesn’t necessarily overlap with that Transitional Council.”
That said, as the death toll among Iranian leaders continues to mount, it could be that no one is now safe.
“And the message that sends is one of regime change,” said Yacoubian. “That’s what the US and Israel in particular have been focused on.
“We have heard President Trump, in one of his many different interactions with various members of the media, note that the US had identified successors, and that those successors had been killed.
“I think that about sums it up, and that’s why I think that any public naming of a supreme leader may not come for some time.”
She added: “In some ways, it’s not clear how important that is at this point. I think the focus in Iran right now is very much on maintaining regime cohesion, such as it exists.
“The military and security circles have long been engaged on these questions and have been thinking through this type of scenario planning.
“So I don’t know how significant it is that we have yet to hear of a new supreme leader being named because these other centers of power, which have long existed in Iran, were likely already planning for a post-Khamenei transition well before this current conflict started, and they are clearly still acting and working, perhaps in a decentralized way.
“So yes, there have been decapitation strikes. But what that actually means in terms of how the system in Iran is operating is unclear.”
