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Breaking Up Iraq: From the 1982 Essay to the Secret Base

Iraq is a country of about 45 million people made up of three large communities: Shia Arabs in the south, Sunni Arabs in the center and west, and Kurds in the north. For more than forty years, Israeli strategists have written about Iraq not as land to annex but as a strong Arab state to be broken into weaker pieces along those lines. This page follows that idea from a 1982 essay, through the 2003 American invasion that removed Saddam Hussein, to an Israeli base inside Iraq during the 2026 war on Iran.

The 1982 essay​

In February 1982, Oded Yinon, a former official of Israel's Foreign Ministry, published "A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s" in Kivunim, the journal of the World Zionist Organization. Its words on Iraq, as quoted by Activist Post:

  • Iraq, "rich in oil" while "internally torn" between Sunni and Shia, was "guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets."
  • Its dissolution was "even more important for us than that of Syria."
  • "Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon" (Activist Post, 30 January 2025).

A later summary describes the plan as dividing Iraq "into three regions (Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdistan)" (Aprajita Nafs Nefes on X, 26 June 2026). The full document and its reception are covered on The Yinon Plan of 1982.

1996 to 2003: from paper to war​

In 1996 a group of American advisers, among them Richard Perle and David Wurmser, wrote "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" for Netanyahu, then newly elected prime minister. It called for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and rolling back Syria, with Iran named as a threat (Grok summary of the document on X, 23 September 2026; full account on A Clean Break (1996)). Several of its authors held senior posts in the Bush administration that invaded Iraq in 2003. In September 2002 Netanyahu, then out of office, testified to the US Congress in favor of preemptive action against Iraq (C-SPAN).

After the invasion, Iraq was split in practice exactly along Yinon's lines: a Kurdish region in the north with its own government and army, and years of Sunni-Shia civil war. A 2026 post summarized the result: "Iraq: The Yinon Plan mandated its division into three regions (Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdistan). This is exactly what we see today; Iraq has been effectively partitioned."

Israel has long had ties to Iraq's Kurds. Accounts describe Mossad keeping a presence in northern Iraq since the 1950s and hosting the Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani at a Mossad camp in Israel (as stated by Aprajita Nafs Nefes on X). When Iraq's Kurds held an independence referendum in 2017, an Iraqi vice president said Baghdad "will not allow the creation of a second Israel in northern Iraq" (r/worldnews, citing Rudaw, 2017). The Israeli commentator Avi Lipkin put the Kurds on the far side of Israel's future border: "from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates. And who is on the other side of the Euphrates? The Kurds!" (Prof. M Reza Salami on X, 26 October 2024). The Iranian-born writer Akbar Ganji argued in 2026 that the war on Iran aims at a "Second Israel" in the form of a Kurdish state carved from Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran (Akbar Ganji on X, 15 January 2026).

In July 2025 Iran's official news agency reported that "Israeli-linked accounts on X have shared a map of Iraq divided into three new 'states,' claiming that the country is set to be divided into three parts by 2026" (IRNA on X, 7 July 2025).

2026: the secret base​

During the war on Iran that began on 28 February 2026, Israel "built a secret military post in Iraq to support its campaign against Iran and launched strikes on Iraqi troops who almost found it early in the war," the Wall Street Journal reported, and the United States knew (Wall Street Journal on X, 9 May 2026; article). Max Blumenthal set the report beside the old claim that the two blue stripes on Israel's flag stand for the Nile and the Euphrates (Max Blumenthal on X, 9 May 2026). War correspondent Elijah Magnier described what he sees next: Iraq broken into "Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shiistan," made to disarm, left without an air force, and made to "allow Israel to establish a base and then take part of the country in due course" (Elijah Magnier on X, 25 September 2026).

Why this matters for the Iran war​

Iraq is the road to Iran. A broken Iraq with an Israeli foothold inside it is exactly what a long war against Iran requires, and it is what the planning documents described decades ago. A 2009 Council on Foreign Relations contingency memo titled "An Israeli Strike on Iran" laid out flight paths "over Jordan & Iraq" (George Christensen on X, 14 June 2025). The American public was told in 2003 that Iraq was about weapons. The pattern this page traces says it was about breaking the region, with Iran as the last piece.

Evidence rating: CONFIRMED that Israeli strategy papers called for breaking up Iraq and that Israel operated a secret base in Iraq during the Iran war (per the Wall Street Journal). STRONG that the breakup of Iraq serves the Greater Israel project and the war on Iran.

Status: Richard Perle, David Wurmser, Benjamin Netanyahu, Avi Lipkin, Akbar Ganji, Max Blumenthal, and Elijah Magnier are alive. Oded Yinon's current status is unknown. Mustafa Barzani (1979) and Saddam Hussein (2006) are deceased. Nothing on this page states that any living person committed a crime.

Sources​

Research captures: twitter/t27__v313.md, twitter/t27__v315.md, twitter/t27__v316.md, twitter/t27__v321.md, twitter/t27__v322.md, twitter/t27__v323.md, twitter/t27__v324.md, twitter/t28__v328.md

Last Updated: 2026-09-26

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