Since the United States and Israel launched their bombing campaign against Iran, Tehran has expanded the battlefield across the Middle East.<\/p>\n
That includes in Irans western neighbor, Iraq, where Tehrans proxy forces have carried out almost daily attacks against US targets, including diplomatic and military facilities, triggering retaliatory American air strikes.<\/p>\n
Iran itself has carried out waves of missile and drone strikes in Iraq’s semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, where Iranian Kurdish opposition groups operate camps and offices.<\/p>\n
The intensifying violence has threatened to destabilize Iraq, a Shiite-majority country of some 46 million people that is still recovering from years of insecurity following the US-led invasion in 2003 and the long conflict it set off.<\/p>\n
The chances of Iraq being pulled deeper into the Iran war are extremely high, said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a New York-based think tank.<\/p>\n
That’s partly a result of Tehran’s influence, especially over the past two decades, where the regime has become in many ways inextricably linked with Iraqi militias.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the United States and Israel launched their bombing campaign against Iran, Tehran has expanded the battlefield across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28142,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[13199,5419,13195,94,13196,13198,2081,69,13197],"class_list":{"0":"post-28141","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iraq","8":"tag-battlefield","9":"tag-carried","10":"tag-carried-out","11":"tag-iraq","12":"tag-kurdishiran-war","13":"tag-pulled","14":"tag-strikes","15":"tag-tehran","16":"tag-the-battlefield"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116261384539871247","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28141\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}