The Iran Endgame
The Iran truce expired with a demand for surrender. Drones hit Erbil before dawn. Tehran's banker flew to Baghdad chasing $11 billion. The endgame is here.
Iraq received both of Tehran's answers yesterday. At 12:28 in the morning, two Hadid-110 drones came over Erbil and struck the private office of Kurdistan's Prime Minister, Masrour Barzani, and the home of the region's intelligence chief. Nobody was hurt, and this was not a first: the Barzani family has been in Tehran's crosshairs all year, with the President's residence struck in March.
The family patriarch counts 5 attempts on his own home, and 16 drones plus 3 missiles were thrown at the region in the first 2 weeks of August alone. What was new yesterday is that the munitions went at the sitting Prime Minister's own office. By the afternoon, Iran's other envoy had landed in Baghdad carrying a briefcase instead of a warhead: Hemmati, the governor of Iran's central bank, sat down at the Central Bank of Iraq to ask for Iran's trapped money back.
The two visits are one message. When Tehran ran Iraq's money, nothing needed asking: its cash moved through Baghdad on its own say-so. Now its central bank has to fly in and formally request access to $11 billion, and the only thing it can still deliver to Iraq without permission is a drone. The regime has gone from owning the system to asking it for a withdrawal.
By nightfall, Baghdad showed you it understood the moment. The Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, President Amidi and Chief Justice Faiq Zaidan, the four heads of the Iraqi state, met into the evening over three files: the weapons, the corruption, and the salaries. Meanwhile the memorandum that had kept Washington and Tehran talking expired the same day, and the White House declined to renew it. From here the endgame on Iran moves in the open, military and financial at once. Every piece of it runs through Iraq.