Iraq (and Iran) are screwing up the fight against ISIS

A couple of weeks ago some enterprising “US official” declared that plans were in place for an Iraqi force to attempt to push ISIS out of Mosul in “April or May.” This seemed like a pretty odd way to go about your business in a time of war. For one thing, no sooner had the announcement been made than everybody who was supposedly involved in this operation immediately began to distance themselves from it and argue that it was premature to talk about any offensive against ISIS’s biggest prize to date. For another thing, you don’t generally, you know, announce your war plans in public like that. I’ll admit, pie-eyed optimist that I am, I briefly thought that there might have been some real strategery going on, that the public announcement of the planned offensive was made in order to signal to forces inside Mosul who might be ready to ditch ISIS that help was on the way. HAHAHA, optimism is for suckers; the Pentagon walked back all that Mosul offensive talk a week later. It was just a screw up.

It was not, however, as fatal a screw up as what is currently being perpetrated by the Iraqi army, and its Iranian “advisers,” in Tikrit. At present the Iraqi army, supplemented by a whole bunch of Shiʿa militias, is trying to drive ISIS out of the town of Al-Dour, just south of Tikrit, with an eye toward attacking Tikrit itself in short order. On paper, retaking Tikrit would be the biggest Iraqi victory since ISIS’s major advance last year, and hapless as the Iraqi army still might be, they’ve got a decent chance of success here. But the way they’re going about it is all but certain to turn short-term success into long-term failure.

As an aside, I feel like it’s a good time for another periodic reminder that, at least on the ground, ISIS is losing. This fact is actually, thankfully, starting to break through the “we’re all gonna die” media narrative. Airstrikes and local resistance have blunted ISIS’s momentum (which for a conquering would-be caliphate is itself a defeat) and has been able to roll back some of their gains. We’re even starting to hear reports that ISIS is fracturing internally, which was probably inevitable (they’re ripe for a succession dispute whenever Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi finally expires) but is happening faster than I would have guessed (most likely because their momentum has shifted so completely). They’ve been destroying some of Iraq’s most irreplaceable archeological heritage in recent days, which is utterly horrible but also seems like the actions of a group that is both lashing out in frustration and knows it might not control those heritage sites for much longer. This is all by way of saying that the odds for the Iraqi army are looking pretty good these days.

(Also, please don’t make much of this reported Boko Haram “pledge of allegiance” to ISIS. Without some hard evidence that the two groups are working together operationally, this amounts to little more than a declaration of fanhood. They do have one thing in common, though: Boko Haram has been losing lately as well.)

But in a fight against a group like ISIS, how you win is as important as winning itself. ISIS exists and has thrived because of Sunni grievance against Baghdad (and Damascus, but let’s focus on Iraq), and while it’s one thing to defeat them on the battlefield, the important work is in ameliorating the conditions that made their past successes possible in the first place, otherwise you’ll be right back in the same place fighting the same battles in another year or two, when ISIS has been replaced by some other group feeding off the same resentment. And a key, maybe the key, to defeating ISIS in a way that will bring long-term stability as opposed to merely short term relief is that the fight against them has to be led by an empowered Sunni Arab population that is then treated fairly by the Iraqi government. That’s not what’s happening:

The campaign, which entered it’s second week on Sunday, is the first serious attempt to dislodge Isis from a Sunni area it has governed since the group’s military blitz in Iraq last June. Despite the American-led air strikes since the summer, the militant group has faced little pressure inside what can be described as its heartlands, such as Mosul, Falluja, Raqqa and Deir Ezzor. The offensive in Tikrit is therefore a critical development that will be monitored closely and nervously by almost everyone involved in the conflict. It is also the first major effort led by pro-government forces without consulting the United States and members of the international coalition. That latter fact leaves many question marks about the campaign. The Iraqi government portrays it as a national effort, led by the security forces and including thousands of Sunni tribal fighters. It also claims that Tikrit is all but empty of civilians.

But these claims are not entirely accurate. Hashd al-Shaabi, the umbrella organisation for Iranian-backed Shia militias, put together in the wake of Isis’s takeover of Mosul in June to serve as a de facto replacement for the army in the fight against the terror group, is leading the offensive. Any Sunni forces participating, notwithstanding their numbers, take a back seat at best.

The claims with regard to civilians are particularly alarming. Hashd al-Shaabi has a track record of human rights abuses and sectarian and ethnic cleansing, as documented by Human Rights Watch. Instead of highlighting that Tikrit’s civilians have almost completely fled the city, the government should focus on ensuring no similar reprisals against civilians by these notorious militias are committed in Tikrit.

Not only are Sunnis not leading the fight against ISIS, they’re being sidelined for those Shiʿa militias I mentioned above, forces whose real allegiance may be to Tehran, not Baghdad, and whose willingness to needlessly slaughter Sunni civilians has been apparent for some time now. The insistence that Tikrit is empty of civilians sounds disconcertingly like a pre-attack justification for atrocities (if it’s settled “fact” that there are “no civilians” left in Tikrit, then whatever those militias do once they control the city will be giving ISIS what it deserves, right?) rather than an objective assessment of the situation. And even if Tikrit is taken without a single report of excessive or misdirected violence, how is the image of a bunch of Iranian-advised (led?) Shiʿa militias capturing a major Sunni city supposed to help ease the deeper concerns of Iraq’s Sunni community? The fact of the matter is that, if Tikrit really is empty of civilians, it’s because tens of thousands of them have only recently fled the city out of concern not for ISIS, but for the arrival of those militias.

Most worrisome, if this is how Baghdad “liberates” Tikrit, what does that foretell for the eventual Mosul offensive, whenever it comes? If Baghdad’s goal is to actually drive Iraqi Sunnis back toward ISIS, what they’re doing here is definitely one way to go about it.

The Shiʿa-heavy nature of the Tikrit campaign, and particularly Iran’s high-profile role in it, has caused the US to sideline itself apparently for the duration. This is wise, but maybe not for the reasons that US policymakers are intending. The American concern is undoubtedly over Iran’s increasing influence in Iraq, but in my view that’s not what the real concern should be. I’d be far less worried about Iran’s regional profile or how our friends elsewhere in the region are responding to it than I would be about the fact that what Iran and Iraq are doing right now isn’t going to work. An operation led by Shiʿa militias and backed by Tehran is only going to exacerbate the very problems that allowed ISIS to revive itself and take Mosul in the first place. For the US, whose regional interests extend beyond the question of who controls northern Iraq, the last thing it needs is to be seen as the air wing of an Iranian/Shiʿa-led campaign to bludgeon Iraqi Sunnis.