From what I've seen, it's not tribal in Iran and Iraq. But at this point in time, it is religious, and at this point in time, there are a lot of opportunists.
I'll drop back to my role as the anti-terrorism officer for all of Iraq. The United States, before it invaded.... First off, our State Department had paid Chalabi $33 million to provide information on Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction and his other great technologies. The Defence Intelligence Agency had also provided him with double-digit millions. Basically, Chalabi made about $100 million off the American taxpayer to give us misinformation.
Then the State Department had Chalabi go to Tehran to make sure that it was okay with them for us to invade Iraq and bring down Saddam Hussein. Well, of course it was. But one of the conditions the State Department received and the American government received was that it also attack the Mujahedin-e-Khalq.
As the American forces and the British forces moved in--and I saw this personally--the Iranians were setting up. They already had Hakim's Badr Corps and Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. They were already established in the country. As we went through dropping Saddam's forces.... Well, dropping? They disappeared on us, with the exception of the Fedayeen in Nasiriyah. As his rule was dropping, I came to realize, when I got there, that the Iranian government had come up and had started replacing the governments.
We talk about the Fallujah triangle, which is basically from Tikrit down to Fallujah and over to Baghdad. I developed another expression, and that was the Iranian wedge, which I was witnessing. It went from Al-Kut to Al-Diwaniyah to An Najaf up to Karbala and over to Al-Hillah and back. I could see this great--it was almost like a tidal wave--struggle in that location at that time. Diwaniyah was really the centre of gravity, because the tribal chief there was determined not to come under the control of Iran and he was also not coming under the control of al-Qaeda. He mobilized his tribe to try to secure the city. Unfortunately, that success fell. But that was the main area where I was having to deal with the Iranian influence as the anti-terrorism officer.
I came back to the States, and then I was, by name, requested to go back to Iraq to be the J-3 of detention operations. I started seeing that the influence had jumped from Iran, through Baghdad, and was now being struggled for in Diyala Province. What Iran was pushing for, if the country fell and went into three sectors, was this: Kurdistan would be up north; Al-Anbar Province would probably end up going to Saudi Arabia; and the Iranians would gather as much as they could of the Shia areas in the rest of Iraq.
Diyala was really the fight. Because in the 1920s, Baghdad only had about a 20% Shia population. By the time we arrived, it had jumped to 50%. In part, that was because of the Industrial Revolution, but in part it was because Karim Qasim, the general who took control of the government from the monarchy from 1958 to 1963, really wanted to do good things. He saw great poverty, so he built what is now Sadr City. It used to be Qasim City and then Saddam City.
By then, by the time I came back, that Shia population had pretty well taken control of a lot of the Baghdad area. Now we were finding that they were going after Diyala Province. Also, and I had to deal with this several times, in one case in particular, we got word that the Iraqi Ministry of Interior, which was a very corrupt organization, was moving their forces into villages and telling the villagers that they had one hour to clear.