Tehran, YJC. CIA director has said Iran has “certainly brought to bear a number of capabilities” against ISIL.
CIA Director John Brennan on Friday described the battle for
Tikrit as "a good example” of the effort to dislodge ISIL from areas they
controlled.
"They’re not invincible, they can be stopped and that’s been
proven,” Brennan said during an appearance today at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York.
Just last week, Iraq launched a major offensive to retake
the northern city of Tikrit with a combined force 25,000 Iranian-backed Shia
militia members and Iraqi security forces.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs
of Staff, told Congress earlier this week that Iranian-backed Shia militias
made up 80 percent of the force pressing towards Tikrit. Warren said there have
still been no U.S. airstrikes in support of the Iraqi offensive.
Iran has "certainly brought to bear a number of
capabilities” against ISIL, Brennan admitted.
The CIA director said his agency was not working with the
Iranians inside Iraq, though both countries have an interest in defeating ISIL.
Brennan said he thought there was "an alignment of some
interest between ourselves and Iran, clearly in terms of what ISIL has done
there.”
"So we work closely with the Iraqi government, the Iranians
work closely with the Iraqi government as well,” he added. "So some of
these efforts I think through the Iraqi interlocutors are ones that again are
trying to advance our common objectives against ISIL.”
Last year, President Obama reportedly sent a secret letter
to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei noting the shared interest in
the fight against ISIL and said that any cooperation on the effort was
dependent on certain components of ongoing talks trying to halt the country’s
nuclear program.