Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia are fighting a proxy war in Iraq, where a surge in sectarian violence is being fueled by both sides.
Monday’s attempted assassination of Iraqi Parliament Speaker Osama al-Nujaifi, and the death of 21 Islamic militants at a bomb-making school outside Baghdad, set a new measure of instability in Iraq.
A mounting death toll – more than 1,000 deaths in January -- has been running parallel with rising tensions between Tehran and Riyadh on the international stage.
Iran’s titanic influence over Iraq is no secret. Ironically, the main beneficiary of the US invasion of Iraq was Uncle Sam’s archenemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Tehran exerts its will in Iraq through multiple channels: through the Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, the firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr whose Mahdi Army once fought pitched battles with US forces and through the highly-revered senior clerics in the Shiite seminaries of Najaf.
Iran reportedly has no qualms about also interfering more directly.
In a 2011 article, Britain’s respected Guardian newspaper named Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s elite Qods Force which conducts special operations outside Iran, as “The Iranian general ‘secretly running’ Iraq.”
“In Baghdad, no other name invokes the same sort of reaction among the nation's power base – discomfort, uncertainty and fear,” the newspaper said.
"He is the most powerful man in Iraq without question," Iraq's former national security minister, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told the newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat in July 2010. "Nothing gets done without him."
But unlike Iran, which has almost flaunted its power and influence in neighboring Iraq, the Saudi role has been more muted and less publicized.
King Abdullah’s dislike for Maliki came into the open after WikiLeaks exposed private conversations between the Saudi royal and a top American official. “I don’t trust this man,” Abdullah is reported to have told the Americans at a 2009 meeting at his palace. “He is an Iranian agent.”
According to reports last year, King Abdullah had sent invitations to Sunni tribal leaders for all-expenses-paid pilgrimage trips to the kingdom, on condition they agreed to meet with him. The invitations were denounced by Iraqi Shiite leaders, who accused Riyadh of interference in internal affairs.
More interesting was a statement this month by al-Qaeda, disavowing any links with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
"Al-Qaeda announces it is not linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, as it was not informed of its creation (and) did not accept it," read the statement, which criticized ISIL's mode of operations.
ISIL "is not a branch of al-Qaeda, has no links to it, and the [al-Qaeda] group is not responsible for its acts," it added.
The statement is important because ISIL was always believed to be the local branch of al-Qaeda. But the disavowal raises several nagging questions: What is ISIL? Who is it loyal to? And who finances the group, which is also fighting against the Iranian-backed regime in Syria?
There have been allegations that ISIL, which preaches the puritanical and intolerant Wahabi version of Islam, is run by Saudi Arabia.
Iraq’s Al Sumaria TV reported last month that a senior ISIL commander had met with a top Saudi intelligence official in Anbar province, just weeks before he was killed by Iraqi forces.
Citing a top Iraqi security official, it said that a senior ISIL captive had confessed that Commander Shaker Vahib al-Fahdavi secretly met with the top Saudi intelligence official 20 days before his death.
The channel reported that: “The unnamed captive, a senior al-Qaeda member who was arrested recently by Iraqi force, also said that ISIL, which operates both inside Iraq and Syria, received USD 150 million and 60 vehicles in aid from Saudi Arabia one day before an anti-government camp was dismantled by Iraqi forces in Ramadi.”
Without naming Saudi Arabia directly, a 2010 diplomatic cable from the US Embassy in Baghdad, exposed by Wikileaks, alluded to the role of Iraq’s “Sunni neighbors.”
It concluded that Iranian influence in Iraq “is not aimed, unlike that of some Sunni Arab neighbors, at fomenting terrorism that would destabilize the government.”
Classified cables by then US Ambassador Christopher Hill had this to say about those “Sunni Arab neighbors”: “A few of our more senior contacts hint at similar malign intentions ‘by some neighbors,’ making clear without being explicit that they are referring to Saudi Arabia.”
The ambassador said: “The view of key contacts here is that some of Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors have concluded that in a stable, peaceful Iraqi democracy, Sunni political power in Iraq would be finished.”
He added that: “These Arab neighbors, therefore, conclude that the only way the Sunnis will ever come back into power in Iraq is in the wake of a period of sustained instability and violence that de-legitimizes democratic governance and the Shia as Iraqi political leaders.”
The regional rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh is decades old, already fought in battlegrounds in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But it has intensified over Western and regional allegations that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb.
King Abdullah is reported to have "frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program," according to WikiLeaks exposure of more US diplomatic cables.
Failing to convince the United States, the Saudis have reportedly been increasingly frustrated at what they see as Washington’s weakness.
In Iraq, where both sides share borders and Riyadh has been frustrated at the rise of Iranian influence – especially after the departure of US troops just over two years ago -- the Saudis appear to have taken things into their own hands.
As the WikiLeaks cables prove, the United States is not ignorant about the war being played out in Iraq. However, it is in US interests to have Iranian influence curtailed in Iraq without American lives or money being lost.
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