MIDDLE EAST

Arab Nations to Form Military Force to Counter Iran and Islamist Extremists

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKMARCH 29, 2015

CAIRO — The Arab states said on Sunday that they had agreed to form a combined military force to counter both Iranian influence and Islamist extremism, a gesture many analysts attributed in large part to their drive for more independence from Washington.

The agreement came as American and other Western diplomats in Lausanne, Switzerland, were racing to beat a self-imposed deadline of Tuesday to reach a deal with Iran that would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. In response, Saudi Arabiaand other American allies in the region have made clear that they are seeking to bolster independent regional security measures because they see the proposed accord as a betrayal of Washington’s commitment to their security.

Regardless of Iran’s nuclear program, they complain, the deal would do nothing to stop Iran from seeking to extend its influence around the region by backing favored factions, as it has done in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen.

Many of the Arab nations, including Egypt, Jordan and most of the Persian Gulf monarchies, have thrown their support behind a Saudi Arabia-led campaign of airstrikes to counter advances by the Iranian-backed Houthi movement in Yemen; Washington is providing only intelligence and logistical support, but Saudi Arabia is leading the bombing while Egypt, with the largest Arab army, has pledged to send ground troops “if necessary.”

How the agreement, announced at a meeting of the League of Arab States in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, will be implemented is not known. Arab military chiefs are expected to work out more of the details. Officials of the Arab League said the leadership of the combined forces, including the question of whether there might be a single command or a coalition of national units, was still under discussion. Each country’s participation is expected to be voluntary.

But the proposal gained credibility because it was announced in part by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the former general who led the military takeover here in 2013.

“The challenges facing our national Arab security are grave, and we have succeeded in diagnosing the reasons behind it,” Mr. Sisi said, without specifying those reasons. The meeting, he added, was “pumping the blood of hope in the arteries of Arab cooperation.”

Egypt has long considered itself the shield and protector of the oil-rich but sparsely populated gulf monarchies like Saudi Arabia. Yet Mr. Sisi has an especially close relationship with the Saudis and their gulf allies because they supported his ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in 2013. The gulf monarchies have contributed tens of billions in financial assistance to Egypt since then, including new pledges of an additional $12 billion announced this month.

Last year, Mr. Sisi also allowed jets from the United Arab Emirates to take off from Egypt for airstrikes against an Islamist-allied political faction in Libya. This year, the Egyptian Air Force carried out a strike of its own in Darnah, in eastern Libya, in retaliation for the beheading of a group of Egyptian Christians by an arm of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Both Egypt and its gulf allies remain acutely concerned about Libya’s civil strife and the Islamist groups that have flourished as the government and other national institutions have crumbled.

The idea of a joint military force “has been there before but not so seriously,” said Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo. He noted that Arab joint defense treaties date to 1950 and a joint military command was previously formed for a time in the mid-1960s. That was during the era of Pan-Arab nationalism, when Arab governments joined forces against Israel. That vision ended in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, with a humiliating defeat.

“It is the renewal of an old idea,” Mr. Soltan said, “but this time the level of seriousness looks higher, even if we do not know yet whether the outcome this time will be different than in the past.”

Speaking at the meeting in Sharm el Sheikh, Nabil el-Araby, the secretary general of the Arab League, vowed that the Saudi-led airstrikes against the Houthi movement would continue until the Houthis had surrendered, apparently leaving little hope for negotiating a prompt end to the violence.

The campaign “will continue until all Houthi militias retreat and disarm, and a strong unified Yemen returns,” he said, declaring that the intervention had saved Yemen from sliding into the abyss.

The Houthi movement, which originated in the north of Yemen and follows a strain of Shiite Islam, has seized control of the country’s capital, Sana, and other large cities in part by allying itself with military and security forces still loyal to Yemen’s former strongman, Ali Abdullah Saleh. Mr. Saleh was removed in 2012, after an Arab Spring uprising, in a transitional deal brokered by Saudi Arabia and the other gulf countries. While the Houthis have received financial support from Tehran, the Iranians do not seem to exert a strong influence over the group as they do, for example, with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The Houthis have previously fought as many as a half-dozen different civil conflicts against Yemen’s central government since 2004. None of the previous battles have succeeded in eliminating or fully disarming the movement.