The U.S. assassination of Qassem Suleimani, the mastermind of Tehran’s foreign military operations, in Baghdad last week, suddenly made Iraq the front line in tensions between the United States and Iran. Barham Salih, a British-educated Kurd who spent years representing his party in Washington, was elected President of Iraq in 2018. Salih has been increasingly concerned about Iraq’s vulnerability since the Trump Administration blamed Iran for an air strike that damaged more than a dozen strategic oil installations in Saudi Arabia, in September. I’ve known Salih for more than a quarter century, including when he was in Washington and later when he became the Deputy Prime Minister of Iraq. We began a conversation in September, at the U.N. General Assembly, about the danger that Iraq will become a war zone—again—only this time between the United States and Iran. I checked in with him again on Sunday to update our conversation.
Iraq has struggled to balance ties with both Washington and Tehran since the U.S. invasion, in 2003. “The United States is our ally. Iran is our neighbor,” Salih told me.
