“The president has come to view the threat from Iran is at the centre of so much of the turmoil that bogs us down in lots of places in the Middle East,” said CIA Director Mike Pompeo, speaking at the National Security Summit put on by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) on Thursday.
With a long list of transgressions, Iran has influence with many groups, including the Lebanese Hezbollah, Houthis in Yemen, and Shiite militias, said Pompeo. “You can see the impact that they’re having today in northern Iraq. The threat that they pose to US forces. We had an incident last week.”
A US soldier was killed in Iraq by an Iranian-designed roadside bomb earlier this month.
A senior member of Iran's Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Velayati, rejected that the Islamic Republic assisted Baghdad in their takeover of Kirkuk from Kurdish forces.
"Iran has no role in the Kirkuk operation," Iran's Tasnim news reported Velayati as telling reporters after meeting with a French diplomat in Tehran on Tuesday.
When interviewer Juan C. Zarate raised reports that Iranian Quds’ commander Qassem Soleimani was in Kirkuk this week, Pompeo interjected, “I’m aware of that.”
A senior member of Iran's Expediency Council, Ali Akbar Velayati, rejected that the Islamic Republic assisted Baghdad in their takeover of Kirkuk.
"Iran has no role in the Kirkuk operation," Iran's Tasnim news reported Velayati as telling reporters after meeting with a French diplomat in Tehran on Tuesday.
Iran's perceived role in Iraq is a part of its adventurism in the Middle East, a threat Pompeo said is of concern aside from the nuclear threat. The JCPOA nuclear deal has not curtailed this aggression, he said, and now the US needs to reconfigure its relations with Iran, Gulf states, and Israel to address this threat.
Pushing back against these non-nuclear activities is something President Donald Trump is keen on doing, Pompeo asserted, adding that there is “global consensus” over the need for this push-back against Iran.
As ISIS is defeated in Iraq and Syria, the US needs to shift focus to a post-ISIS Middle East, which for Trump is an unconditional commitment to defeating the threat of radical Islamic terrorism, said Pompeo.
He emphasized that non-state and first-world order problems, such as the situation in northern Iraq, aren't being ignored “from the intelligence perspective.”
“We are well-positioned to deliver information” to senior US officials, said the CIA head when asked about the recent events like those in Kirkuk, which he called “challenging” and “complex.”
Pompeo iterated the need for intelligence relationships surviving “bad diplomatic relations.”
“We have to be there every day even if there are disputes,” he said.
His role, as the US intelligence chief, is to deliver to the president an understanding of the situation so Trump can develop his policies in Iraq and Syria.
In Syria, that policy is to push back against Iran and the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, said Pompeo.
And in Iraq, it is to “ensure that the Abadi government in Iraq is successful.”
