As world powers spent the past few days finalizing an agreement to lift a UN arms embargo on Iran as part of a nuclear deal, Iranian proxies sparked violent confrontations throughout the Middle East.
Forces loyal to Iran-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad killed 13, including seven women and a child, in bombing raids on a market and other targets in al-Bab. Those attacks came shortly after a similar raid targeting the same town on Saturday, which left 34 dead, including three children.
In Yemen, Iran-backed Houthi militants shelled residential areas in the southern city of Aden and wrested traditional land from tribesmen in the eastern Hadramawt desert on Friday evening, violating a United Nations-brokered ceasefire immediately after it went into effect and reigniting clashes across the country.
And on Thursday, supporters of Iran-backed Lebanese presidential candidate Michel Aoun clashed with Lebanese security forces as they sought to storm a government building.
Meanwhile, the semi-official Iranian news agency Fars reported that “the arms embargo imposed against the Islamic Republic will be annulled.” This news is especially significant because Iran will receive tens of billions of dollars in unfrozen assets as a result of the deal, flooding the regime with cash that it can use to pursue its interests across the region. In a likely related development, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani recently flew to Moscow to discuss a boost in military ties, presumably directing much of the regime’s newly available cash to its weapons program.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which was established during the Islamic Revolution to serve as both a military police force within Iran and an imperial army without, is also looking forward to tremendous financial gains. The IRGC controls “major companies, and businesses in Iran such as tourism, transportation, energy, construction, telecommunication and Internet,” an Iranian official told Reuters last week. “Lifting sanctions will boost the economy; it will help them to gain more money.”
Iran has long supported vicious terror proxies throughout the region, and the lifting of the arms embargo is likely to empower them. The Syrian regime has a record of employing illegal weapons in its war against its civilian population, including barrel bombs and chemical weapons. Assad has outdone ISIS and al-Qaeda in brutality, killing far more civilians than the two groups combined. Moreover, Syrian regime forces have on multiple occasions hunted down and executed the children of alleged rebels as a scare tactic. One killing spree in 2010 led to the murders of over 100 people, including 49 children under the age of ten.
The Syrian regime that committed those crimes, however, is not the only Iranian proxy set to gain from the deal. Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq, which are responsible for ethnic cleansing of Sunni civilians around Baghdad and elsewhere, will also benefit. IRGC forces are on the ground in Yemen already as well, and will be reinvigorated in their support for the Houthis, who are responsible for the majority of civilian deaths in the ongoing civil war, which began after they forcibly occupied the capital city of Sana’a. The Houthis frequently shell residential areas and have prevented the United Nations from delivering humanitarian aid to the 80% of Yemen’s population that needs it.
In the past few months, many regional experts—including Foreign Policy editor David Rothkopf, former State Department official Aaron David Miller, Washington Institute of Near East Policy fellows Mehdi Khalaji, Soner Cagaptay and James Jeffrey, and former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz—questioned the assumption that engagement with Iran will lead it to moderate its behavior, rather than embolden its regional ambitions.
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