The Iranian influence in Iraq: between strategic interests and religious rivalry

Abstract

The study provides a brief overview on Iranian republic's policy in post-Saddam Iraq and the Persian Gulf region: it is marked, programmatically, by Tehran's desire to make Iraq a state closer from security and economic points of view to the interests of Iran, benefiting primarily of the emergence of new political elite Iraqi Shiite majority. Iran has supported financially, logistically, militarily, anti-American Iraqi resistance, as well as it supported its political customers to build a special relationship of dependency and affinity with the interests of Tehran. At the same time, there is a great rivalry between Iran and the Iraqi clergy, religious (and geopolitical) competition for supremacy between Najaf and Qom theological centers, each being the adept of individual attitudes in the interpretation of Shi’ism (Pietist vs militant). The study aims, in addition, an analysis on the topic "Shiite crescent", the effective validity of an image of Iranian strategy to coordinate and instrument, in the direction of own interests, the Shiite communities in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. In reality, they, like the Shiite community in Iraq, are characterized by structural heterogeneity and divergent ideological, political, cultural, strategic trajectories, making the implementation of a unitary public in the wake of Tehran very difficult.