Jordan’s King Abdullah has warned the Obama administration in an urgent message that US air strikes alone won’t stop the Islamic State’s advances in Iraq and Syria and, what is more, they leave his kingdom next door exposed to the Islamist peril. ISIS would at present have no difficulty in invading southern Jordan, where the army is thin on the ground, and seizing local towns and villages whose inhabitants are already sympathetic to the extremist group. The bulk of the Jordanian army is concentrated in the north on the Syrian border. Even a limited Islamist incursion in the south would also pose a threat to northern Saudi Arabia, the king pointed out.
Abdullah offered the view that the US Delta Special Forces operation in eastern Syria Saturday was designed less to be an effective assault on ISIS’s core strength and more as a pallliative to minimize the Islamist peril facing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates.
DEBKAfile’s Washington sources report that US officials refused to heed Abdullah’s warning and tried to play it down, in the same way as Secretary John Kerry tried Monday, May 18, to de-emphasize to the ISIS conquest of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest province.
At a news conference in Seoul, Kerry dismissed the Islamists’ feat as a “target of opportunity” and expressed confidence that, in the coming days, the loss “can be reversed.”
The Secretary of State’s words were unlikely to scare the Islamists, who had caused more than 500 deaths in the battle for the town and witnessed panicky Iraqi soldiers fleeing Ramadi in Humvees and tanks.
Baghdad, only 110 km southeast of Ramadi, has more reason to be frightened, in the absence of any sizeable Iraqi military strength in the area for standing in the enemy’s path to the capital.
The Baghdad government tried announcing that substantial military reinforcements had been ordered to set out and halt the Islamists’ advance. This was just whistling in the dark. In the last two days, the remnants of the Iraqi army have gone to pieces – just like in the early days of the ISIS offensive, when the troops fled Mosul and Falujah. They are running away from any possible engagement with the Islamist enemy.
The Baghdad-sourced reports that Shiite paramilitaries were preparing to deploy to Iraq’s western province of Anbar after Islamic State militants overran Ramadi were likewise no more than an attempt to boost morale. Sending armed Shiites into the Ramadi area of Anbar would make no sense, because its overwhelmingly Sunni population would line up behind fellow-Sunni Islamist State conquerors rather than help the Shiite militias to fight them.
Iran’s Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, who arrived precipitately in Baghdad Monday, shortly after Ramadi’s fall, faces this difficulty. Our military sources expect him to focus on a desperate effort to deploy Shiite militias as an obstacle in ISIS’s path to Baghdad, now that the road is clear of defenders all the way from Ramadi.
In Amman, King Abdullah Sunday made a clean sweep of senior security officials, firing the Minister of Interior, the head of internal security (Muhabarat) and a number of high police officers. They were accused officially of using excessive violence to disperse demonstrations in the southern town of Maan.
The real reason for their dismissal, DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources disclose, is the decline of these officials’ authority in the Maan district, in the face of the rising influence of extremist groups identified with Al Qaeda and ISIS, in particular.
(Don’t worry! Be Happy! Obama is in charge so everything will come up roses for sure.
Just ask Obama, the all-wise, all-knowing. He will set it right, as soon as Iran uses the nukes she deserves. — DM)
American warplanes have begun bombing the Islamic State-held Iraqi city of Tikrit in order to bail out the embattled, stalled ground campaign launched by Baghdad and Tehran two weeks ago. This operation, billed as “revenge” for the Islamic State (IS) massacre of 1,700 Shiite soldiers at Camp Speicher last June, was launched without any consultation with Washington and was meant to be over by now, three weeks after much triumphalism by the Iraqi government about how swiftly the terrorist redoubt in Saddam Hussein’s hometown was going to be retaken.
U.S. officials have variously estimated that either 23,000 or 30,000 “pro-government” forces were marshaled for the job, of which only slender minority were actual Iraqi soldiers. The rest consisted of a consortium of Shiite militia groups operating under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, or the Population Mobilization Units (PMU), which was assembled in answer to afatwahissued by Iraq’s revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali Sistani in June 2014 following ISIS’s blitzkrieg through northern Iraq. To give you a sense of the force disparity, the PMUs are said to command 120,000 fighters, whereas the Iraqi Army has only got 48,000 troops.
Against this impressive array of paramilitaries, a mere 400 to 1,000 IS fighters have managed to hold their ground in Tikrit, driving major combat operations to a halt. This is because the Islamic State is resorting to exactly the kinds of lethal insurgency tactics which al Qaeda in Iraq (its earlier incarnation) used against the more professional and better-equipped U.S. forces. BuzzFeed’s Mike Giglio has ably documented the extent to which IS has relied upon improvised explosive devices, and just how sophisticated these have been. Even skilled explosive ordnance disposal teams — many guided by Iranian specialists — are being ripped apart by what one termed the “hidden enemy” in Tikrit.
Because IS controls hundreds of square miles of terrain in Iraq, it has an unknown number of bomb manufacturing plants, and because it knows the terrain so well, it’s been able to booby-trap houses and roads. Even Shiite prayer beads left lying on the ground are thought to be rigged to explosives. One Kurdish official told Giglio that the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters alone have “defused or detonated more than 6,000 IEDs along their 650-mile front with ISIS since the war began in August.”
The toll this has taken on the militias is extraordinary. Cemetery workers in Najaf told the Washington Postthat as many as 60 corpses are arriving per day. Former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Derek Harvey tweeted last week that an Iraqi Shiite source told him the number of militia war dead from the Tikrit offensive so far may be as high as 6,000. So the militias’ triumphalism, much of it no doubt manufactured by Iran’s propaganda machine, proved to be misplaced. Jeffrey White, another former DIA analyst now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, notes “there’s a failure of will on the part of the militias and government forces. They just didn’t have the sufficient desire and determination to take the fight forward given the casualties they’ve been sustaining.”
So now, the same Iraqi government which earlier dismissed the need for U.S. airpower had to put in an eleventh-hour request for it, lest an easy victory descend into embarrassing folly. But the past few months ought to have shown that even indirectly relying on Iranian agents to conduct a credible ground war against Sunni extremists was always a lousy idea for three reasons: those agents hate the United States and have threatened to attack its interest in Iraq; they’re guilty of IS-style atrocities themselves; and they’re lousy at fighting an entrenched jihadist insurgency.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey told Congress on March 3: “What we are watching carefully is whether the militias — they call themselves the popular mobilization forces — whether when they recapture lost territory, whether they engage in acts of retribution and ethnic cleansing.” He needn’t watch any longer. They are engaging in exactly that.
The crimes of war
On March 10, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a comprehensive study of human rights violations committed by both IS and pro-Iraqi forces. The Islamic State, OHCHR concluded, has likely committed genocide against the Yazidis, a ethno-religious minority in Iraq, in a catalogue of war crimes and crimes against humanity that include gang-rape and sexual slavery. But OHCHR’s language is equally unambiguous in condemning the other side on the battlefield: “Throughout the summer of 2014,” the report noted, “[PMUs], other volunteers and [Shiite] militia moved from their southern heartlands towards [Islamic State]-controlled areas in central and northern Iraq. While their military campaign against the group gained ground, the militias seem to operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake.” [Italics added.]
Sunni villages in Amerli and Suleiman Bek, in the Salah ad-Din province, have been looted or destroyed by militiamen operating on the specious assumption that all inhabitants once ruled by IS must be IS sympathizers or collaborators. Human Rights Watch has also lately discovered that the “liberation” of Amerli last October — another PMU/Iranian-led endeavor, only this one abetted by U.S. airstrikes in the early stages — was characterized by wide-scale abuses including the looting and burning of homes and business of Sunni residents of villages surrounding Amerli. The apparent aim was ethnic cleansing. Human Rights Watch concluded, from witness accounts, that “building destruction in at least 47 predominantly Sunni villages was methodical and driven by revenge and intended to alter the demographic composition of Iraq’s traditionally diverse provinces of Salah al-Din and Kirkuk.”
Sunnis weren’t the only demographic subjected to collective punishment. A 21-year-old Shiite Turkmen from the Yengija village was “burned with cigarettes and tied to a ceiling fan” by militants of Saraya Tala’a al-Khorasani, another Iran-backed militia. He told Human Rights Watch: “They kept saying, ‘You are ISIS,’ and I kept denying it. They were beating me randomly on my face, head, shoulders using water pipes and the butts of their weapons…. They went to have lunch and then came back and beat us for an hour and half. Later that night they asked me if I was Shia or Sunni. I told them I was Shia Turkoman and they ordered me to prove it by praying the Shia way…. They kept me for nine days.”
This account tracks with a mountain of social media-propagated video and photographic evidence showing that Iraq’s Shiite militias are behaving rather like the Islamic State — beheading and torturing people they assail as quislings, and then exhibiting these atrocities as a means of recruitment. More worrying, a six-month investigation by ABC News has found that U.S.-trained Iraqi Security Force personnel are also guilty of anti-Sunni pogroms, with officers from Iraq’s Special Forces shown in one video accusing an unarmed teenaged boy of being a shooter (a charge the boy denies) before opening fire on him.
Looking the other way
The Obama administration’s counterterrorism-driven policy for the Middle East, and a quietly pursued diplomatic reconciliation with Iran, has resulted in America’s diminishment of grave war crimes committed by Iran’s clients and proxies, and the problem is hardly just confined to Iraq. In Syria, for instance, the National Defense Force, a conglomerate of militias trained and equipped by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC) — a U.S.-designated terrorist entity — has been accused by the Syrian Network for Human Rights and the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, of “[burning] at least 81 people to death, including 46 civilians; 18 children, 7 women, and 35 of the armed opposition fighters,” along with other pro-Assad forces. The State Department has offered condolences to Iran’s President Hasan Rouhani on the death of his mother; to date, it has not said a word about the immolation of these Syrians at the hands of a Quds Force-built guerrilla army.
All of which raises the question: Does the United States have a “common interest,” as Secretary of State John Kerry phrased it, with a regime in Tehran whose proxies are currently burning people alive in their houses, playing soccer with severed human heads, and ethnically cleansing and razing whole villages to the ground?
It really ought to surprise no one in the U.S. government that what amounts to an Iranian occupation of the Levant and Mesopotamia would lead to an increase in jihadist bloodletting. Dempsey has less of an excuse than most. A four-star general, he formerly commanded the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which in 2004 was the unit redirected, as it was about to go home, to fight the Shiite militias who had taken over Karbala and other southern cities, so he would have seen the precursor to the PMUs in action. Yet somehow managed to brief legislators that the Islamic Republic’s role in Iraq might yet prove “positive” — provided, that is, it didn’t lead to an uptick in sectarianism. This is like arguing that death wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t result in being dead. It did not take much, however, for the scales to fall from Dempsey’s eyes. He took a helicopter tour of Baghdad last week and noticedthe “plethora of flags, only one of which happens to be the Iraqi flag,” The rest, he told reporters to evident dismay, belonged to Shiite militias. (He might have also added that posters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are now omnipresent in the Iraqi capital where ones of Saddam Hussein used to be.)
Everyone from Gen. David Petraeus to Kurdish intelligence chief Masrour Barzani is acknowledging the obvious: that Shiite militias pose more of a long-term threat to the stability of Iraq than does the Islamic State. Even Ayatollah Sistani has made noises lately about the rampant abuses committed by the “volunteers” he assembled through a religious edict.
While it is true that most Iraqis do not wish to live in a state of vassalage to Iran, it also true that most of the “units” in the PMUs are well-known subsidiaries of the Quds Force. “The indoctrination they’ve been getting is anti-American, Khomeinist ideology,” said Phillip Smyth, an expert on Shiite militias and author of a comprehensive survey of them put out by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Sectarianism has been promoted whether we like it or not.”
According to Chris Harmer, a former U.S. Naval officer and now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, there really is no dressing up who the supposed “good guys” in Iraq now are. “They killed hundreds of Americans during the war,” Harmer said. “These are not ‘affiliated’ organizations — they are same guys, the same organizations. And can you find me anybody stupid enough to say that what Iran wants is a stable, unified, secular, non-sectarian Iraq?”
The enemies of our enemy are our enemy
Indeed, quite apart from having American blood on their hands and American interests furthest from their mind, Shiite militias — following Tehran’s favorite playbook — have also taken to conspiratorially blaming the United States for inventing and militarily supporting the Islamic State, while decrying any American anti-IS involvement in Iraq. Take, for instance, the Badr Corps, headed by Hadi al-Amiri, the commander of Hashd al-Shaabi, and a man infamous for “using a power drill to pierce the skulls of his adversaries,” or so the State Department found in a 2009 cable to Washington, which also alleged that al-Amiri “may have personally ordered attacks on up to 2,000 Sunnis.” (Despite this grim record, al-Amiri was invited to the Obama White House in 2011 when he was Iraq’s transportation minister.)
Lately al-Amiri taken to both boasting that Stuart Jones, the current U.S. ambassador to Iraq, personally offered him close air support, whilereprehending those Iraqis who “kiss the hands of the Americans and get nothing in return.” But when it comes to Tehran, he’s full of praise for the “unconditional” support his country has received. Now al-Amiri has found a more modest tongue. He told the Guardian’s Martin Chulov on March 26: “We did not ask for [U.S. airstrikes on Tikrit] and we have no direct contact with the Americans. From what I understand, Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi made the request. However, we respect his decision.”
Kataeb Hezbollah may be the only Iraqi Shiite militia in Iraq to be designated a terrorist entity by the United States, but that hasn’t stopped it from driving around in Abrams tanks, Humvees, armored personnel carriers, MRAPs, and toting M4 and M16 rifles — all the accidental largesse of Uncle Sam, which has sent $1 billion in military equipment to Baghdad, but has no oversight as to which actors, foreign or domestic, ultimately receive what. An abundance of U.S. weapons hasn’t dissuaded Kataeb Hezbollah from openly inciting violence against the American-led coalition to destroy the Islamic State.
“Recently we had them accusing the United States of supplying [IS] via helicopters,” said Smyth. “Kataeb Hezbollah then came out with a bullshit article claiming that they shot down a British cargo plane carrying arms to [IS]. They also said they were going to move antiaircraft missile batteries in Anbar and north of Baghdad to counter U.S. airdrops to [IS]. Whenever they sense too much of a U.S. influence in Iraq, they start to threaten American soldiers.” Kataeb Hezbollah, it bears mentioning, is headed by Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, an Iranian spy who is widely believed to have planned the bombings of both the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in the 1980s. There’s even a photograph of him holding up a Kuwaiti newspaper fingering him for this act of international terrorism. Kataeb Hezbollah has also been caught on video playing bongos with severed human heads.
Another prominent Shiite militia is Asaib Ahl al-Haq, or the League of the Righteous, which in 2007 set an ambush which killed 5 U.S. servicemen in Karbala. It, too, now also happily motors around Iraq in U.S. armored vehicles, some of them thought to have been stolen from the U.S. consulate in Basra. One unnamed U.S. official told Al Jazeera that Asaib was most recently responsible for burning down homes in Albu Ajil, a village near Tikrit in retaliation for massacres carried out by the Islamic State. It has also been implicated in the abduction and murder of Sheik Qassem Sweidan al-Janabi, one of the Sunni tribal leaders who worked cheek-by-jowl with U.S. forces in fighting al Qaeda in Iraq during the so-called Awakening period.
Remarkably, the demagogic Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, once the bane of U.S. forces in Baghdad, condemned al-Janabi’s murder — in language more severe than anything contrived by the U.S. State Department’s Marie Harf or Jennifer Psaki. “Did not I tell you that Iraq will suffer from the brazen militias?” al-Sadr was quoted as saying. “Did I tell you that the army must handle the reins?” Al-Sadr demanded that Shiite head-loppers be punished and actually backed up his rhetoric with action, suspending the participation of his own al-Salam Brigades and al-Yaom ak-Mawood military in ongoing operations. (He unsuspended these militias a week ago to help with the battle in Tikrit, but so far, because of the frozen nature of the ground campaign, none of the Sadrists have seen any real action.)
Assad’s friends in Iraq want to kill Americans
The Basij-ization of Iraq of was both inevitable, given the defunct and corrupted state of the U.S.-trained military, and Iran’s outsize influence in Baghdad even before ISIS conquered a third of the country. “When the Iraqi Army was destroyed last July, this was a gift to Iran to build up these militias,” Gen. Najim Jibouri, the former mayor and police chief of Tal Afar, a crucial Iraqi border town now held by the Islamic State, said in a recent interview. “A few days ago, Khaled al-Obaidi, Iraq’s minister of defense, went to Tikrit, but the militias wouldn’t allow him to enter. He had to stay in Samarra.”
All of which makes risible U.S. officials’ continued emphasis that there is no direct American coordination with Iran or its proxies. Gen. James Terry, the U.S. commander of the coalition, claims that the “ongoing Iraqi and coalition air strikes are setting the conditions for offensive action to be conducted by Iraqi forces currently surrounding Tikrit. Iraqi security forces supported by the coalition will continue to gain territory.”
One of the authors personally witnessed in Baghdad how the IRGC targets make their way into the U.S. targeting queue. Shiite militia commanders pass Quds Force-selected targets to Badr-affiliated Iraqi Security Force commanders on the ground (many of whom are, in fact, agents of the militias), who then pass them on as legitimate targets to Iraq’s Defense Ministry representatives in the Joint Operations Centers where U.S. advisors then put those targets into a queue for aerial sorties. This is the pattern of target development that U.S. forces tried to stop during the American occupation of Iraq — when there was actually a military strategy for countering Iranian influence in the country.
But this nefarious chain of putting intelligence into action — and making the United States do the dirty work — has been resurrected. Soleimani knows it, al-Muhandis knows it, al-Amiri and his Badr agents in the Iraq Security Forces know it — so, too, should the Pentagon, whatever claims to the contrary it puts out. Iranian intelligence operatives are now America’s eyes on the ground.
What does this mean for Tikrit? The Islamic State will no doubt be flushed from the city or bombed to death eventually, but it will be a tactical loss for IS, not a strategic one. They’ll still have Mosul and most of Anbar province. The Institute for the Study of War’s Chris Harmer notes that this will have a direct bearing on bigger fights ahead. “These militiamen will say, ‘This is how badly we got beat up in Tikrit, who wants to volunteer to storm that castle in Mosul?’”
Even if Iran’s proxies do end up massing on Mosul, they’ll remain the ultimate occupying force in post-Islamic State Tikrit. The Washington Post’s Loveday Morris tweeted on March 26 that Kataeb Hezbollah and Asaib Ahl al-Haq have now “suspended” their operations in the city, no doubt out of a desire to not appear to be coordinating with the hated United States. But once the Pentagon declares victory, the militias will no doubt try to hijack it and move right in to serve as the occupying force in Tikrit.
Despite reports on Thursday that three Shiite militias were “withdrawing” from operations in objection to U.S. airstrikes, now the news has come that they’ve called off their boycott, largely owing to another edict by Ayatollah Sistani. Even an alleged accidental hit by U.S. warplanes on Asaib Ahl al-Haq barely raised that militia’s pique, according to the New York Times. A Badr Corps representative also told the newspaper, “We haven’t retreated from our positions near Tikrit.” Still, others have indicated that they’re not going to let a good turn go unpunished and intend to strike at American soldiers in Iraq.
Akram al-Kabi, the leader of the Al Nujabaa Brigade, which has also fought with the Assad regime in Syria, has said: “We are staying in Tikrit, we are not leaving and we are going to target the American led coalition in Tikrit and their creation, ISIS.” Today, one of al-Kabi’s spokesmen reiterated thatthreat. Al-Kabi was once a deputy in Asaib Ahl al-Haq and was associatedwith that militia’s attacks against U.S. and British troops in 2008-2011, including an incident in which British contractors were abducted from the Iraqi Finance Ministry and later murdered. CENTCOM commander Gen. Lloyd Austin’s nevertheless briefed the Senate on Thursday with a straight face that “[c]urrently, there are no [Shiite] militia and as reported by the Iraqis today, no [PMU] in that area as well.” This is either propaganda or sheer ignorance about what is transpiring in Austin’s theatre of operations. The Guardian’s Chulov, who just returned from Tikrit, confirmed to one of the authors, in fact, that both al-Amiri and al-Muhandis were indeed in the center of the city on March 26.
Recrimination and resentment by these militias is no light matter. According to Politico, U.S. military planners are now worried that any decision to engage or isolate the Assad regime in Syria will encourage Iran or its cut-outs to attack the some 3,000 U.S. military trainers currently stationed in Iraq. It’s hard to tell where genuine concern bleeds into further excuse-making on the part of an Obama administration that has shown no intention of engaging or isolating the Assad regime, which is responsible for the vast majority of war dead and war crimes in Syria. Regardless, the result is the same: Washington is now behaving as if it needs Tehran’s permission to pursue its own anti-IS strategy, if it can even be called that.
You call this a plan?
“What strategy?” asks Chris Harmer. “We have only consequentially intervened in one part in Syria — Kobani. What’s the plan for countering [the Islamic State] there? Training 5,000 Syrian rebels per year. That is laughable when you consider the 200,000 dead from four years of attritional warfare, the four million refugees, and slow-motion destruction of the country. Five thousand doesn’t even get you into the ballgame. You have to have a significant portion of the population on your side. Moderate Syrians should be on our side. They’re saying the Americans are unreliable, they’re not on our side. This is why the moderate opposition has collapsed and the beneficiaries of that collapse have been al Qaeda, the Islamic State and Assad.”
The loss of confidence in the United States by moderate Sunnis in Syria is mirrored in Iraq. New polling data has confirmed that most Mosulawis, for instance, welcomed IS back into Iraq’s second city not out of ideological sympathy for the terror group, but out of deep-seated political grievances with the Iraqi government. Yet the Obama administration is doing next to nothing to redress these grievances. The Anbar tribal leader Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, whose charismatic brother was notoriously gunned down by al Qaeda just days after meeting with President George W. Bush in Baghdad in 2007, simply could not get a meeting with any significant official in White House during a 10-day tour of Washington last February. Vice President Joe Biden was good enough to drop in on a lesser confab, mainly to smile and pat them on the head and tell them to work constructively with the new government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
“Many of the people in Mosul will stand with [the Islamic State] if Shiite militias invade,” said Gen. Najim Jibouri. “Eighty percent of the population is does not like [IS], but if the militias are involved — 80 percent will stand very strong with [IS]. I told the Americans before, the image now is not like it was in 2003. Now the Sunni people want American forces. They will throw the flowers on them now, because the battle now is not between them and the United States and [IS], it’s between the Sunnis and Iran.” Yet far too many Sunnis still see the United States as aligned with Iran against them, Jibouri said.
Whether or not a nuclear agreement with Iran gets signed in Lausanne this weekend, whether or not Obama inaugurates a perestroika with Tehran as a result, the unshakable truth is that most of Iraq looks in the long term to remain a satrapy of the mullahs. This will only lead to further sectarian violence and civil war. “I met with almost two dozen national leaders in Iraq last week,” Ali Khedery, the longest consecutively serving U.S. diplomat in the Green Zone, told us. “I heard from Sunni, Shiite, Kurdish officials and virtually all of them told me that the real prime minster of the country is Qasem Soleimani and his deputy is Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.”
In Baghdad’s Firdos Square, where in 2003 U.S. Marines helped Iraqis topple the statue of Saddam Hussein, there is now a billboard featuring Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini.
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The U.S. is training a national army for a nation that does not exist.
The Iraqi Army and Shiite militias have now launched an operation to retake Tikrit, a Sunni city 95 miles north of Baghdad that was Saddam Hussein’s hometown. The Americans are standing back. The U.S.-led coalition air forces are not flying missions in support because this is essentially an Iranian-organized and -led operation dominated by Shiite militias that answer to Tehran as much as Baghdad. This may be the shape of things to come.
In mid-February, a Pentagon official made headlines by announcing an April-May time frame for an Iraqi offensive to take Mosul from the so-called Islamic State. Mosul is the second-largest city in Iraq. As The Daily Beast reported last week, the Pentagon now says the April/May date is no longer operative. The Iraqi Army, it was explained, is not ready.
It may never be ready.
Staff Sgt. Tanya Thomas/US Army
At the beginning of 2014, the Iraqi Army comprised 17 divisions. By the end of the year, it was at most seven divisions, possibly as few as five. And, even at full strength, the Iraqi Army was not much of a fighting force.
In spite of outnumbering the ISIS attackers by a ratio of between 10/1 and 15/1, the Iraqi Army lost Mosul in just 10 hours on June 10, 2014. The ISIS forces came to Mosul in pickup trucks. The defenders had armored American Humvees, tanks, helicopters, artillery, and advanced rifles, all of which ended up in ISIS’s hands. Two months later, ISIS used these American weapons to attack the Kurds. The United States, which provided weapons worth billions to the Iraqi Army, is now spending hundreds of millions on airstrikes to destroy them.
Pentagon planners understand the deficiencies of the Iraqi Army. It is disorganized, poorly led, politicized, corrupt, and plagued by sectarian and ethnic divisions. But, where they go wrong is to imagine that these problems can be corrected with better leadership, training, and a policy of inclusiveness towards disaffected Sunnis and Kurds.
In fact, the problems of the Iraqi Army reflect the problems of Iraq where Shiites and Sunnis don’t agree on what it means to be Iraqi and where the Kurds unanimously don’t want to be Iraqi at all. The deficiencies of the army cannot be corrected because they reflect the realities of the society.
The Obama administration and virtually all American foreign policy experts blame former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki’s sectarian policies for contributing to the rise of ISIS. In this telling, Maliki alienated Sunnis by breaking promises to include the Sons of Iraq (the Sunni militia that was key to the defeat of al Qaeda in 2007) in the Iraqi Army, by appointing Shiite loyalists as top officers, and by marginalizing Sunnis in the army, government, and society. Maliki’s administration was sectarian, corrupt and ineffective. But, he may have been right about the Sunnis.
George W. Bush engineered a revolution in Iraq, albeit apparently unaware that he was doing so. The 2003 invasion ended 80 years of Sunni Arab dictatorships and replaced them with democratically elected governments. In each of the elections held since 2005, Iraqi Shiites voted overwhelmingly for Shiite religious parties.
Sunnis, even the many who are not particularly religious, do not accept that the Iraqi identity should be defined in a way that excludes them or treats them as a minority. Many Sunnis believe that Iraq’s new rulers are more loyal to their Shiite co-religionists in Iran than they are to Iraq.
Iran’s decades-long sponsorship of Iraq’s Shiite parties, including the Dawa party of both Maliki and current Prime Minister Haider al Abadi—reinforces Sunni perceptions, which, in any event, may not be wrong. In Baghdad’s Firdos Square, where in 2003 U.S. Marines helped Iraqis topple the statue of Saddam Hussein, there is now a billboard featuring Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khameini.
As the Shiites see it, the Sunnis have refused to accept majority rule. They remember—as American planners seem to have forgotten—that Sunni tribal leaders welcomed and supported the al Qaeda extremists who, between 2003 and 2006, assassinated Shiite clerics, massacred Shiite pilgrims, and bombed markets and bus stations in Shiite cities and towns.
The Sunnis turned against al Qaeda not out of revulsion with the killing of Shiites or because they wanted reconciliation, but rather because the extremists had turned on the tribal leaders. When al Qaeda demanded money, daughters and fealty, the Sunni sheikhs had enough. Helped with American cash, they formed militias that finished off al Qaeda in Mesopotamia in a matter of months.
Maliki understood full well that there was no genuine reconciliation between the Shiite religious parties and the Sunnis. He minimized the Sunni role in the Iraqi Army (and central government) because he saw no value in incorporating Sunnis into an army whose primary mission is to protect a Shiite state from Sunnis. And, he was not wrong in his judgment.
When ISIS approached Mosul, some Sunni officers and troops acted as a fifth column providing intelligence and weapons to the attackers. Sunni soldiers who surrendered either went home or joined ISIS. The Shiite commanders fled to nearby Kurdistan, leaving Shiite recruits to face torture and execution (all recorded in videos) at the hands of ISIS.
Ever since Bush’s administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, dissolved Saddam Hussein’s army in 2003, the United States has struggled to create an effective Iraqi army. It is impossible to build a real national army when Iraqis do not have a shared idea of the nation and when its components see each other as the enemy.
There are, of course, effective fighting forces in Iraq that are combatting ISIS. The Kurdistan Peshmerga pushed ISIS out of territory it took in August and continue to battle ISIS around Kirkuk, Makhmur, and Mosul. The Kurds have sustained nearly 1,000 casualties and, supported by American close air support, inflicted many times that number on ISIS.
The Kurds, of course, are motivated to defend Kurdistan. They may support a Mosul operation from their territory, but they have made it clear that they will not sacrifice Kurdish lives in a Sunni Arab city or on behalf of a country, Iraq, that they don’t want to be part of.
Shiite militias—armed and, in some cases, led by the Iranians—defended Baghdad and Samarra (home to an important Shiite shrine) last summer. More recently, they have pushed ISIS out of villages in religiously and ethnically mixed Diyala province (sometimes clashing with Peshmerga units).
The Iraqi Army itself is increasingly a sectarian institution. Ironically, this may make it a more effective fighting force. Sunni Arabs who remain in the army are reluctant to sacrifice their lives on behalf of a Shiite state, especially if it means fighting against fellow Sunnis. (Many recruits signed up not to defend Iraq but for a salary, which also contributes to a reluctance to get killed.) By contrast, the Shiite militias fought hard in 2014 to defend their homes and their religion. To the extent that the Iraqi Army becomes more like a Shiite militia (albeit paid and better armed), it may share the militias’ zeal.
The Pentagon still sees the Iraqi Army as a national institution and, as a result, provides it with the lion’s share of U.S. military assistance. Seeing it as another of the ethnic and sectarian forces in Iraq is probably more realistic and may lead to a more effective distribution of weaponry. Currently, more U.S. weapons go to an Iraqi Army that is not ready to fight than to a Kurdistan Pershmerga that is fighting. (Iran supplies the Shiite militias as part of the informal division of labor among the anti-ISIS forces.)
If the offensive against Tikrit now underway should fail (and the Iraqi Army has had considerable difficulty trying to take even some small villages adjacent to a large air base in Anbar province), it will not auger well for a Mosul campaign.
But, success in Tikrit will not necessarily translate into success in Mosul. A foreign army—and this is exactly how Mosul’s Sunnis will see the Iraqi Army—fighting house to house in a city of 3 million is certain to kill a lot of civilians even if the Army behaves well, which is unlikely.
Should it lose Mosul, ISIS would still have substantial territory in Iraq, a pool of resentful Sunnis and a sanctuary in Syria.
In a deeply divided Iraq, a successful government offensive to take Mosul may not solve much.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters keep watch during the battle with Islamic State militants on the outskirts of Mosul January 21, 2015. AZAD LASHKARI/REUTERS
A senior Kurdish federal official, who declined to be named, said that Peshmerga forces would never hand back areas captured after Isis’s march across northern Iraq, which brought the group to within miles of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
While the threat of Isis remains significant, Kurds may have to put their independence dreams on hold and the Iraqi government will worry about Kurdish territorial claims later. As the terror group continues to grow, both parties need each other and the radical Islamist threat will bind them together, at least for now.
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Kurdish forces launched a barrage of Grad missiles against Islamic State (Isis) positions inside Mosul last week, for the first time since Isis overran Iraq’s second-largest city in June last year, marking a dramatic shift in the Kurds’ battle against the terrorist group.
The bombardment was preceded by a large-scale Kurdish operation against Isis in northern Iraq, which saw 5,000 Kurdish fighters, supported by US-led coalition airstrikes, sweep around Mosul to recapture an area larger than the size of Andorra, Liechtenstein and San Marino combined.
In the offensive, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters killed over 200 Isis militants, ousting the group from almost 300 square miles of territory, capturing a number of areas contested with Baghdad. As they advanced, encircling Mosul on three sides and cutting vital Isis supply lines to the nearby towns of Tal Afar and Sinjar, the Kurdish forces began a counter-offensive that analysts worry may be the start of a territory war between the Kurdish capital, Erbil, and Baghdad.
The Kurdish forces captured Makhmour, to the east of the city; the towns of Zimar and Wannah, and several Arab villages located in the Sinjar Mountains, west of Mosul; and the area around Mosul Dam, in what amounts to a Kurdish land-grab backed by Western airstrikes.
Iraqi Kurds believe that the recaptured territory around the city is rightfully theirs while the Iraqi government “fears that the Kurds will use territory as leverage during political negotiations”, according to Ranj Alaaldin, a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
A senior Kurdish federal official, who declined to be named, said that Peshmerga forces would never hand back areas captured after Isis’s march across northern Iraq, which brought the group to within miles of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region. “All the current military operations that involve the Peshmerga are implemented in coordination with the international military coalition and the central government is aware of it, but, in the Kurdish areas, we will never ever let Arabs control them again,” the official warned. “We are not ready to fight, terrify our fighters’ souls to liberate these areas and hand them to a traitor who would sell it to the killers. We will not allow this scenario to take place again in these areas.”
While the Kurds argue that they have taken control of this territory to defend against Isis, many Iraqis believe that the Kurds will never give up what they have captured because of their ambitions for an independent state.
“In the chaos that followed the Isis assault on Iraq in June, the Iraqi army melted away from its positions throughout northeastern and northwestern Iraq and the Peshmerga swiftly moved in to take their place – taking control of the whole of Kirkuk,” she said.
Despite these aspirations, Iraqi officials seem content to let Kurdish forces claim the territory from Daesh (as Isis is also known), for now. “As long as we are not ready to move as far as to fight in Mosul, it would be better to let them (Kurds) re-control these areas rather than leave it at the hands of Daesh,” a senior Iraqi military officer said. “Now, we will not raise any political disputes. Let [the Kurds] drive the militants away from these areas and we will think about the consequences later,” he added.
Hamed al-Khudari, a senior Shia lawmaker, agreed that Iraqis should “clear our lands” and “talk about this [territorial dispute] later”. Nevertheless, analysts do not believe that the Iraqi government in Baghdad is capable of ousting Kurdish forces from the territory they have seized in the recent advance. “Baghdad cannot do much to kick out the Kurds from any territory they have captured,” says Wladimir van Wilgenburg, analyst on Kurdish politics for the Jamestown Foundation.
The Kurds’ success on the battlefield, coupled with rumours of a potential Iraqi operation in Mosul, has put Isis on the back-foot but also caused disagreement between Erbil and Baghdad. Differences remain over involvement in any potential operation to recapture Mosul. Masrour Barzani, the head of Kurdistan’s regional security council, has said that Mosul will soon be “liberated” from the terror group’s self-proclaimed caliphate. “I don’t think anyone would envy the situation the people of Mosul are in,” he said. “The terror of Isis is too much for anyone to handle.”
But Kurdish officials believe that the responsibility for the recapture of the predominantly Sunni-Arab city lies solely with Baghdad. “Peshmerga are now 8km away from Mosul but they will not fight inside the city,” the official, who declined to be named, said. “When it comes to liberating Mosul, its people have to fight, not anyone else. We will just support them because we do not want anyone to say that Kurds are fighting Arabs. The [Iraqi] government understands that Mosul is not our battle or Shiites’ battle. Arab Sunnis in Mosul have to take the initiative to liberate their areas.”
Whereas Kurdish officials believe that Baghdad should take leadership over the battle for the city, where citizens now live under the group’s radical version of Islamic law, Iraqi officials claim that the battle against “Daesh is everyone’s to fight. The main goal now for all Iraqis is to fight Daesh and drive them away from all the Iraqi lands, so we will not allow anyone to talk about these [territorial] issues”, says al-Khudari. “This [fighting against IS] is the responsibility of everyone including the central government, the Kurdish forces, the public crowd (Shia militias and volunteers) and the anti-IS Sunni tribes.”
The lack of Kurdish motivation to enter into a battle for Mosul alongside Iraqi forces is due to the knowledge that any fight would be a drawn-out and lethal affair, according to van Wilgenburg. “They know the battle is going to be very heavy if it has to involve street to street fighting,” he says.
“The Kurds are already assisting the fight in Mosul. They recently fired into the city.” Erbil and Baghdad both have “to be pragmatic”, says Gonul Tol, executive director at the Center for Turkish Studies at the Middle East Institute. Baghdad is focused on recapturing Isis-held territory as opposed to Kurdish territory while Kurds “do not want to get involved” in Mosul to avoid “igniting a Kurdish-Arab war”.
While the threat of Isis remains significant, Kurds may have to put their independence dreams on hold and the Iraqi government will worry about Kurdish territorial claims later. As the terror group continues to grow, both parties need each other and the radical Islamist threat will bind them together, at least for now.
(RUDAW is a Kurdish media network. Hezbollah was conceived by Muslim clerics and funded by Iran following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. From the inception of Hezbollah to the present, the elimination of the State of Israel has been one of Hezbollah’s primary goals. [Footnotes omitted.] — DM)
Thousands of Shiite men responded to a call for jihad after ISIS stormed across Iraq in June and captured a third of the country. AFP photo.
BAGHDAD, Iraq – The leader of Iraq’s Hezbollah met with Shiite clerical authorities in Najaf Sunday to discuss formal recognition of hundreds of thousands of militiamen by the government and putting them on official payroll, a Hezbollah statement said.
Sheikh Abbas al-Mahmadawi, leader of the Shiite militia group Hezbollah, said that he met with Shiite clerics in Najaf, including Ayatollah Muhammad Saeed al-Hakim, to seek recognition “for the success of the militia groups in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS).”
Al-Mahmadawi added that the Shiite volunteer militia should be recognized by the authorities and compensated financially “because many of them do not have any salaries and many have been wounded and handicapped.”
According to al-Mahmadawi, there are 800,000 volunteer Shiite fighters in Iraq who joined the fight against ISIS last June.
But he added that “the numbers have been inflated by some political parties” by more than double.
“We do not have any such numbers on the ground which is put down as 2 million volunteers,” he said in a statement following his visit to Najaf.
Al-Mahmadawi hoped that Baghdad would put the Shiite militia on its payroll now that the country is about to pass this year’s budget.
Thousands of Shiite men responded to a call for jihad against ISIS by Iraq’s Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani last year, when the extremist Sunni group captured Mosul and made a lightening advance towards Baghdad and important Shiite shrines.
A great number of Shiite militiamen are based in the towns of Jalawla and Saadiya, north of Diyala, which they jointly liberated from ISIS in November.
Local residents, mainly the Kurdish population, have remained apprehensive about returning to their homes for fear of the armed militia groups, which operate outside government control and have been accused by Sunnis of acting as vigilantes.
On Saturday, Iraq’s parliament speaker Salim al-Jibouri met with Kurdish leaders in Sulaimani on forming a joint committee to facilitate the return of displaced peoples to Jalawla and Saadiya.
Meanwhile, around 200 tribal and political figures in Diyala met on Saturday to discuss normalizing the situation in the province after some of the fiercest battles between ISIS and a joint force of Peshmerga and Shiite militia groups.
Qassem Suleimani and Hadi al-Ameri head of Badr Organization
The objective of mullahs in dispatching revolutionary guards and strengthening militias is not to fight ISIS but to compensate for the decisive blow of Nouri al-Maliki’s ouster and to consolidate dominion of velayat-e faqih caliphate over Iraq
NCRI – The Iranian Resistance warns of the escalating presence of the criminal revolutionary guards of the terrorist Qods Force (QF) in Iraq that is a blatant breach of UN Security Council resolutions and underscores that their objective is not to fight ISIS, but to compensate for the heavy blow caused by Maliki’s ouster and to consolidate the velayat-e faqih caliphate in Iraq.
The slaughter and forced migration, along with aggression against the Iraqi people, in particular the Sunnis, and ridding them of their property by the revolutionary guards and their affiliated militias under the pretext of fighting ISIS has endangered peace and security throughout the region and fuels the machine of extremism and terrorism in the whole region.
1. According to Resistance’s information from inside the regime, the number of revolutionary guards of the QF now reaches 7000 in Iraq. A large number of them have been stationed in Baghdad, Diyala and Salah ad-Din provinces and the cities of Samarra, Karbala, Najaf, Khaneqain, Sa’adiyah and Jaloula. A great number of commanders and experts from the revolutionary guards accompany the terrorist militias in various areas of Iraq. Regime’ fighter jets have been flying in Iraq since early November and are currently carrying out military missions in Diyala and Salah ad-Din provinces.
2. The extent of this meddling is such that mullahs’ Defense Minister Dehqan stated on December 20: “In the realm of weapons and equipment, usually their governments (Iraq and Syria) purchase from us and in the realms of training and advising we are serving the armies and resistance forces of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.” He added: The presence of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq “is to offer advice, guidance and training… the people who have gone there are to advise and offer training to help out with organizing and training and to offer advice on operational plans”.
3. The clerical regime and the QF that had brought Iraq under their hidden occupation in a step by step manner since 12 years ago, had taken over all aspects of that country through their proxy prime minister. Subsequent to the initiation of the popular uprising against Maliki in January 2013, they broadened their interference to suppress the uprising and to strengthen their hand in Iraq.
4. Since January 2014 that Maliki initiated the Anbar conflict and suffered a severe defeat in the hands of the people and tribes of that region, the Iranian regime felt imperiled and thus the presence of the QF in Iraq took on new dimensions. Mohammad Hejazi, Deputy for Logistics in regime’s General Command Headquarters of the Armed Forces, announced that the clerical regime is prepared to offer Iraq equipment and consultation (IRNA News Agency – January 5, 2014).
5. In February 2014, a number of QF commanders who had participated in the slaughter of the Syrian people went to Iraq to pass on their experiences in trainings to the Iraqi forces. Intimately and directly they transferred their experience in Iran and Syria to Ali Qaidan, the at the time Commander of the Army, and Fadhil Barwari, the Commander of the Golden (Dirty) Division. They primarily order to Maliki to establish a Basij-like force. They noted that they had initiated the civil defense in Syria which is capable of saving Assad’s regime; the classical army is designed to fight an external war and is useless in guerrilla warfare.
6. During this period, the QF beefed up the terrorist militia groups under its command such as Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, Kata’ib Hezbollah and Badr Corps and dispatched them to Anbar Province, especially to Ramadi and Garmeh regions. Their first task was to pump morale into Maliki’s military. Since March 2014, 15-day training courses were arranged for these militias in Iran; the same thing that the regime had initiated two years ago for the mercenaries who were dispatched to Syria.
7. In March 2014, the QF sent some trainers from the Lebanese Hezbollah to Iraq to organize and train the militias and concurrently sent all types of weapons and equipment in an attempt to organize a powerful force capable of preserving the power in the hands of Maliki and Iranian regime’s elements.
8. Since late March 2014, the militias who had been equipped and organized in orderly units and were accompanied by QF commanders were deployed in battlefields and specific defensive lines were trusted to them. The Garmeh region until Zaidan and Baghdad Beltway from Taramiyah to Abu Ghoraib was given to Asa’ib militias; Fallujah and Baghdad Beltway from south of the airport to Yousefiyah was given to the Kata’ib terrorist group; and the Badr forces were deployed to the west of Fallujah and Ramadi. A division composed of the militias was organized to be deployed in Baghdad’s Beltway from Taramiyah to Madaen, west of Baghdad. Maliki and the QF jointly provided their equipment. Special equipment, bombs and missiles were transferred to Najaf and Baghdad through air transport with coordination by Hadi Ameri, Iraq’s at the time Minister of Transportation, to be transferred subsequently to these forces.
9. During this period, the commanders of the QF were placed in active liaison and direct coordination with Maliki’s army and police commanders and a joint Tactical Operating Center (TOC) was set up in Anbar. IRGC Brigadier General Iraj Masjedi, Qasem Soleimani’s “supreme advisor”, and a number of other commanders of the QF were deployed in Iraq. In addition, “Esmail Qa’ani Akbarnejad”, Deputy to Qasem Soleimani, regularly travelled to Iraq to supervise the situation.
10. Following the disintegration of Maliki’s army on June 10 and as Ninawa and Salah ad-Din slipped from his hands, the QF dispatched its command system to Iraq in a matter of hours. In the early days of this development, over 2000 seasoned revolutionary guards entered Iraq who were primarily tasked to Baghdad’s Beltway. Others were deployed in Diyala. Concurrently, people from IRGC Air Force were deployed in Diyala, Salah ad-Din and Kurdistan to collect information and direct drones. The number of revolutionary guards continues to rise and has now reached 7000.
11. At this stage, Soleimani used Abu Mehdi Mohandess, the known terrorist, as his Deputy of Operations in Iraq and commander of the militias and formed a special TOC for coordinating the militias in Baghdad. The military and security responsibility for Diyala was given to Hadi Ameri, Maliki’s Minister of Transportation. These two are both in the list of 32000 employees of IRGC in Iraq. This is the list that the Iranian Resistance exposed back in 2006.
12. To compensate for the sidelining of Maliki and regain former status, the clerical regime ramped up the presence of the QF in August and the presence of Qasem Soleimani increased, especially in battlefields such as Amerli, Jarf al-Sakhar, Sa’adiyah and Jaloula. In order to build up the morale of its defeated mercenaries, regime’s Farsi and Arabic speaking media staged a noisy propaganda campaign about the presence of Soleimani and the IRGC in Iraq.
13. During this period, organizing the “popular Basij” forces was left to the militias and the QF. In an interview with al-Iraqiya state TV on December 22, Maliki’s National Security Advisor Faleh Fayad stipulated that there are a number of “Iranian advisors” within the “popular Basij” forces.
14. The objective of IRGC and the militias is not to fight ISIS, but to exploit on the present situation and consolidate their grip on Iraq. That is why the massacres, aggressions, forced migration of populations, and ridding the Sunnis of their property that have been ongoing by these forces since 2003 took on unprecedented dimensions in the recent months. In an interview on December 1st with the official website of Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), Sheik Jafar, KDP’s official in Khaneqain, said: “The actions of Shia militias is like ISIS or even worse. They are experts in killing, burning and looting. They have disrupted 90% of Sa’adiyah and looted and burned all its places… Their objective is to expand their rule and influence… They rarely use the Iraqi flag and mostly hoist a flag that carries the emblem of the Islamic Republic of Iran… They have initiated purging of all Sunnis and kill people anywhere they can… These forces blew up people’s homes under the pretext of neutralizing mines and explosives.”
15. In a shocking report on December 15, the Al-Jazeera TV unveiled the bombing of Sunni areas and forcible displacement of the Sunnis in Iraq including in Diyala and Salah ad-Din and especially in Samarra, various districts of Baghdad and its suburbs such as Mahmoudiyah, Arab Jabour, Jarf-al-Sakhar, Yousefiyah, Latifiyah, Abu Ghraib, Taji and Moshahedeh by the militias affiliated with the QF. The number of forcibly displaced people in Baghdad reaches one million. A resident of Jarf-al-Sakhar testified, “Militias burn homes, arrest the youth, and kill them in undisclosed locations… No Sunni family is left in Jarf-al-Sakhar. They arrest young and old men, forcibly displace the families, and kill them… We are witnessing the beginning of an Iranian caliphate just as ISIS has announced its caliphate.”
16. On 14 October 2014, in a detailed report titled “Absolute impunity, Militia rule in Iraq”, Amnesty International underscored the affiliation of the militias to the Iranian regime and wrote:
• The growing power of Shi’a militias has contributed to an overall deterioration in security and an atmosphere of lawlessness.
• Shi’a militias are ruthlessly targeting Sunni civilians on a sectarian basis under the guise of fighting terrorism, in an apparent bid to punish Sunnis for the rise of the IS and for its heinous crimes.
• Scores of unidentified bodies have been discovered across the country handcuffed and with gunshot wounds to the head, indicating a pattern of deliberate execution-style killings.
• Militia members, numbering tens of thousands, wear military uniforms, but they operate outside any legal framework and without any official oversight.
• By granting its blessing to militias who routinely commit such abhorrent abuses, the Iraqi government is sanctioning war crimes and fuelling a dangerous cycle of sectarian violence that is tearing the country apart.
• Successive Iraqi governments have displayed a callous disregard for fundamental human rights principles. The new government must now change course and put in place effective mechanisms to investigate abuses by Shi’a militias and Iraqi forces and hold accountable those responsible.
17. On 18 September 2014, the Foreign Policy website in an article titled “Iraq’s Shiite militias are becoming as great a danger as the Islamic State” wrote: “These groups, many of which have deep ideological and organizational links to Iran… are actively recruiting — drawing potential soldiers away from the Iraqi army and police and bringing fighters into highly ideological, anti-American, and rabidly sectarian organizations. Many of these trainees are not simply being used to push back Sunni jihadists, but in many cases form a rear guard used to control districts that are supposedly under Baghdad’s control…In early June, Shiite militias, along with Iraqi security forces, reportedly executed around 255 prisoners, including children…The growth of these pro-Iranian Shiite militias, and many more like them, helps demonstrate Iran’s goals for the domination of Shiite Iraq. These groups not only benefit from Iran’s patronage and organizational capabilities — they also all march to Tehran’s ideological tune. They are loyal to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and Iran’s ideology of absolute wilayat-e faqih.”
18. On September 16, New York Times wrote: “‘We break into an area and kill the ones who are threatening people,’ said one 18-year-old fighter with Asaib Ahl al-Haq… insisting that their militia commanders had been given authority by Iraqi security officials… This militia was once a leading killer of American troops … Alla Maki, a Sunni lawmaker said that under former Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Asaib Ahl al-Haq was ‘encouraged to do dirty jobs like killing Sunnis, and they were allowed to operate freely. Now the international community are all being inspired by the removal of Maliki personally, but the policy is still going on’… So far, though, there is no sign of any official attempts to investigate even the most publicized allegations of extrajudicial killings of Sunnis by Asaib Ahl al-Haq.”
The goal of the Islamic State might be to create enough chaos in the capital city of Baghdad to cause a mass exodus of its Shia population southward, thus ceding Baghdad to the Sunnis by default.
Is it still possible to salvage if not Iraq, at least Baghdad? Sunni Muslim troops, led by ISIS (now the so-called Islamic State, or IS) and fighting against the Iraqi government, have virtually surrounded Baghdad. Iraq’s largest province, al-Anbar, is almost totally occupied by anti-regime forces. Only a portion of Fallujah remains outside of occupation by the IS-led forces. After the IS took over the city of Hit, regular Iraqi units fell back into a defensive posture at al-Asad, the largest military facility in Anbar. Several key population centers to the north and northeast have also fallen, and there is still heavy fighting around the oil refineries of the northern city of Baiji.
IS’s gains north of Baghdad last month prompted U.S. aircraft bombing sorties. Since June, the central government also has lost ground east of the capital; Diyala Province barely remains under Shia control. After the collapse of government forces in Hillah, south of the capital, and IS’s mid-June seizures of Iskandariyah and Mahmoudiyah, barely six miles south of the Baghdad, routes to Iraq’s Shia heartland have also now been jeopardized.
Islamic State fighters receive a pre-battle briefing and sermon before their attack on Samarra, 125km north of Baghdad.
While the fall of the capital is certainly not imminent, IS’s strategy appears clear. Opposition forces will likely continue to tighten the noose around Baghdad in an attempt to create a sense of isolation. IS will avoid, for now, any large-scale assault on Baghdad for three reasons: it does not have the manpower; Shia militias outnumber enemy forces and will fight zealously to keep the Shia in control of the capital; and a major attack might cause remaining U.S. ground forces to become actively involved in the conflict.
One indicator that American forces might join the fight in a more serious way, if Baghdad appeared truly threatened, was the Pentagon decision on October 12 to employ Apache Attack helicopters against IS forces when they approached Baghdad International Airport. This week, on November 8, U.S. President Barack Obama also approved sending up to 1,500 more U.S. troops to Iraq, although stressing that that “would not be in combat.” The increase would raise the number of U.S. troops in Iraq to just under 3,000, or about eight times fewer than likely needed to re-salvage Iraq.
Meanwhile, fighting has come within two miles of the capital, with IS taking Abu Ghraib.
At present, the IS-led Sunni coalition appears determined to inculcate a feeling of despair among the capital’s Shia citizenry. The daily suicide bombing attacks in Shia neighborhoods must be taking a psychological toll. The suicide bombers are foreign fighters, mostly from North Africa. In the past few months alone, they have killed hundreds of Shia citizens. The operational planners of these assaults apparently know the layout of the capital, a familiarity that suggests they may have been former Baath Party military officers under the reign of Saddam Hussein.
The daily roadside bombs and car bombs are adding to the concern that the security situation in the capital is spiraling out of control. Moreover, there can be little doubt that some within the Sunni neighborhoods are giving logistical and intelligence support to the encircling IS. That intelligence certainly appears to have been available in the October 14 targeted killing of Baghdad’s pro-Iranian commander of the Badr Brigade, Ahmad al-Khafaji. Additional pro-Sunni elements probably have established a network of safe houses to support enemy infiltrators.
The day that the fate of Iraq as a united state irrevocably turned toward disintegration occurred in December 2013, when the largely Shia security forces stormed the Sunni protest camp in Anbar Province’s capital of Ramadi. Not even those tribal sheikhs who may have hoped for reconciliation with the Shia-led regime could reverse the process of permanent alienation. After former Iraqi Vice President Nouri al-Maliki’s fall from power on August 14, newly installed Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has fared no better. Moreover, he seemingly has even less influence within the governing Shia coalition than al-Maliki originally possessed. He has moved too slowly, it seems, to reach out to Sunnis. Furthermore, with IS at the gates of Baghdad, the new administration did not name a new Minister of Defense and Interior until October 17.
The goal of IS’s siege strategy may be to create enough chaos in Baghdad to cause a mass exodus of its Shia population southward to the Shia provinces of Najaf and Karbala, thus ceding Baghdad to the Sunnis by default.
Smoke rises over Syrian town of Kobani after an airstrike, as seen from the Mursitpinar crossing on the Turkish border, Oct. 21, 2014. Reuters/Kai Pfaffenbach
The U.S.-led air campaign in Syria has killed 521 Islamic State fighters in the past month, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a group monitoring the civil war. But the heavy death toll does not mean the United States is winning its fight to “degrade and destroy” the Sunni extremist group. Experts say that won’t happen until the group also known as ISIS loses support and its fighters begin defecting.
“Until that happens, we will not see a quantum shift in the war in Iraq and Syria,” said Wayne White, a former deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia.
Since June, ISIS has gained control of large swaths of land that stretch from Kobani on the Syrian-Turkish border to the outskirts of Baghdad. The group is currently waging campaigns in several different areas of both countries, but has focused its forces in recent weeks on capturing the Kurdish city of Kobani. As a result, the U.S.-led air campaign has targeted several ISIS convoys and strongholds in Kobani and is air-dropping weapons and other resources to the Syrian Kurds fighting there.
“Like many aerial campaigns you can cite from history, it is a gradual process,” White said. “ISIS has a finite number of heavy weapons, and they are being picked off. And ISIS is losing a lot of combatants that are not easily replaced. ISIS is driven to expand its domain, and every time it tries to expand it is putting its fighters out in the open where they can be taken out. The question is: How long will the degrading take until you get to the destruction … a long time.”
Witnesses on the ground in Kobani told International Business Times that ISIS had been pushed back from the center of the city, but that the fighting was still raging on the outskirts. Meanwhile, ISIS is making gains in other parts of Syria and in Baghdad. According to the Syrian Observatory, ISIS fighters seized Tal Shaer, a town just west of Kobani, this week. And in Baghdad, the Sunni militant group has claimed responsibility for several car and suicide bomb attacks that have killed dozens of people in the last two weeks.
The uptick in ISIS attacks since June in Iraq has not only caused hundreds of civilian deaths, but has also infiltrated the psyche of the Iraqi people, especially those living in the capital, Noof Assi, a woman from Baghdad, told the International Business Times.
At the beginning of the ISIS campaign, “Baghdad looked like a ghost city,” Assi said. “People were staying at home or fleeing, saving food and fuel.”
Now, she said, people in Baghdad are used to the ISIS insurgency. Discussions in shops, cafes and restaurants have shifted. No longer are Iraqis talking about the destruction that ISIS is inflicting on the country. Now, people are talking about how many people are beginning to support the militant group.
“There are people talking about people of Mosul,” she said of the big northern city. “Some people are saying that they betrayed Iraq and welcomed ISIS.”
The State Department and White House have both confirmed that part of the U.S. strategy to fight ISIS is to undercut its propaganda and recruitment, especially on social media. So far, though, the U.S. has not launched a successful countercampaign.
The mock video showed graphic images of the militant group committing war crimes that have been widely reported over the past two months and that are now being investigated by the United Nations. The video looks similar to those ISIS promotes on social media like Twitter and YouTube. Despite the counterpropaganda drive, ISIS continues to expand on social media, and more and more Western fighters, as well as Iraqi and Syrian civilians, are joining up.
While some experts say the only way the U.S. will defeat ISIS is by sending in ground troops, others say more credit should be given to the Syrian Kurdish fighters — who now seems to be only force on the ground in Iraq and Syria that is regaining territory ISIS took over in prior months.
“They are the only boots on the ground in the entire Iraqi-Syrian theater capable of standing up to ISIS,” White said. “They are absolutely fierce fighters. The Iraqi Kurds are not.”
Kobani no longer looks to be in imminent danger of falling. It is even possible that ISIS will give up the fight and pull out. If this happens, it will certainly be good news. The remaining residents of Kobani would be saved from slaughter and their relief would give a moral boost to anti-ISIS efforts. But any celebration should be muted. Winning at Kobani will be no more devastating to ISIS than was the American victory at Khe Sanh to North Vietnam.
The problem is that ISIS can readily replace the fighters it loses in Kobani, and heavy weapons are not essential to its guerrilla style of warfare. Even as ISIS is losing a little ground at Kobani, it is gaining strength elsewhere.
Only 12 U.S. advisory teams have been deployed and only at the brigade level. The other 14 Iraqi brigades identified by the U.S. as “reliable partners” have no advisers at all. None of these advisers, moreover, is allowed to accompany Iraqi troops into combat, where they can be most effective. The U.S. also is not stepping in to offer direct assistance and training to the Sunnis of Anbar Province to allow them to fight back against ISIS, as they did against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007-08.
Through the limited application of air power—a mere handful of daily strikes—the U.S. may achieve tactical progress to blunt ISIS’s momentum. But Khe Sanh showed the limits of tactical military victories if they are not married to larger strategic gains—and those are elusive in Iraq and Syria today
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On Jan. 21, 1968, North Vietnamese troops attacked the U.S. Marine garrison at Khe Sanh in South Vietnam near the border with Laos. A 77-day siege ensued, with the U.S. pouring in ever more firepower. The U.S. would drop 100,000 tons of bombs because Gen. William Westmoreland was determined that Khe Sanh not become another defeat like Dien Bien Phu, which had effectively ended France’s colonial presence in Vietnam 14 years earlier.
And it didn’t. Eventually the siege was relieved and the attacking forces melted away, having suffered more than 5,000 fatalities (while the defenders lost about 350 men).
Today, no one except some veterans and military historians remembers Khe Sanh because in the end it had scant strategic significance: Even though the U.S. won the battle, it lost the war. Not long after having “liberated” Khe Sanh, the U.S. dismantled the base because it served little purpose.
This history is worth mentioning because of the parallels, limited and inexact to be sure, between Khe Sanh and Kobani, a Kurdish town in northern Syria. Jihadist forces of Islamic State, also known as ISIS, have been besieging Kobani for weeks, and the U.S. has been ramping up efforts to prevent the town from falling. U.S. airstrikes have apparently taken a heavy toll, eliminating ISIS fighters, artillery, armored vehicles and other heavy weapons. Airstrikes have now been joined by airdrops of weapons and ammunition to the Kurdish defenders. Turkey, which had hitherto not lifted a finger to save Kobani, announced Monday that it would allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to traverse Turkish territory to join in defending the town.
Kobani no longer looks to be in imminent danger of falling. It is even possible that ISIS will give up the fight and pull out. If this happens, it will certainly be good news. The remaining residents of Kobani would be saved from slaughter and their relief would give a moral boost to anti-ISIS efforts. But any celebration should be muted. Winning at Kobani will be no more devastating to ISIS than was the American victory at Khe Sanh to North Vietnam.
The problem is that ISIS can readily replace the fighters it loses in Kobani, and heavy weapons are not essential to its guerrilla style of warfare. Even as ISIS is losing a little ground at Kobani, it is gaining strength elsewhere.
Its fighters are advancing in Anbar Province with little resistance. They are poised on the outskirts of Baghdad; soon they may be within mortar range of Baghdad International Airport, whose closure would be a disaster. On Monday alone, its car bombs and suicide bombers in Baghdad and Karbala claimed at least 33 lives, a day after a suicide bomber in Baghdad killed at least 28 people in a Shiite mosque. The pattern is reminiscent of the terrorist atrocities perpetrated in 2006 by al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s predecessor, aimed at rallying Sunnis to the terrorists’ side by provoking a civil war with Shiites.
As in those dark days, Sunni extremism is provoking an equally extreme response from Iranian-backed Shiites. The replacement of Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister with Haidar al-Abadi, an apparently less sectarian Shiite, was a small step in the right direction for which the Obama administration deserves credit. But there is little reason to think the Iranian hold over a substantial portion of the Iraqi state has been broken.
The Iraqi Parliament has approved ministers to run the two security ministries—Interior and Defense. While the Defense pick is Sunni technocrat Khalid al-Obedi, the Interior pick is far more worrisome: Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban is a member of the Badr Organization, one of the chief Iranian-backed Shiite militias that is further destabilizing Iraq with attacks on Sunni neighborhoods. The likelihood is that Mr. Ghabban will take orders from his ultimate sponsor, Gen. Qasem Suleimani, head of Iran’s Quds Force.
This means that the Interior Ministry, in charge of Iraq’s police forces, will become, if it is not already, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Shiite militias and their Iranian string-pullers. This happened in 2006 when the Iraqi police became notorious for kidnapping and torturing Sunnis. This helped bring Iraq to the brink of all-out civil war and will do so again if not checked.
The only way to counteract the Iranian capture of the Interior Ministry is to bolster the Iraqi army as an independent fighting force, but there is little sign of this occurring. Shiite sectarians have also deeply penetrated the army and the U.S. has little ability to counteract this insidious development because President Obama will not send a large number of “embedded” advisers to work alongside army units that remain more professional and less politicized.
Only 12 U.S. advisory teams have been deployed and only at the brigade level. The other 14 Iraqi brigades identified by the U.S. as “reliable partners” have no advisers at all. None of these advisers, moreover, is allowed to accompany Iraqi troops into combat, where they can be most effective. The U.S. also is not stepping in to offer direct assistance and training to the Sunnis of Anbar Province to allow them to fight back against ISIS, as they did against al Qaeda in Iraq in 2007-08.
In Syria the U.S. is also doing little to oppose the Assad dictatorship, leaving it free to continue attacks on areas held by moderate militias affiliated with the Free Syrian Army. This, too, is feeding the radicalization of Syria and Iraq by convincing many Sunnis, rightly or wrongly, that the U.S. is acquiescing to Iranian regional domination—and that ISIS is the only reliable defender that Sunnis have. That impression will be strengthened if the Obama administration reaches a deal with Iran next month that will allow Tehran to maintain its capacity to develop a nuclear weapon.
Through the limited application of air power—a mere handful of daily strikes—the U.S. may achieve tactical progress to blunt ISIS’s momentum. But Khe Sanh showed the limits of tactical military victories if they are not married to larger strategic gains—and those are elusive in Iraq and Syria today.
The US Embassy in Iraq located in central Baghdad has been shelled with rockets.
BAGHDAD, October 22 (RIA Novosti) – The US Embassy in Iraq located in central Baghdad has been shelled with rockets, Al-Mustakillah news agency reported Wednesday citing a security source.
“On Tuesday night the US Embassy was hit with three rockets. They were fired from a park area in the Dora district [in southern Baghdad],” the agency’s source said.
Earlier on Tuesday, Al-Sumaria TV channel reported a mortar shelling of the so-called “green zone” in the center of the capital, housing government buildings and foreign missions. Security forces surrounded the area to repel a potential attack.
Qassem Suleimani and Hadi al-Ameri head of Badr Organization
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