Questions abound over US assertion of progress in Iraq

Iranian-backed militias and a fractious international coalition throw US claims this week of a better chance of success in Iraq this time around into doubt.

Fighting is ongoing for the second day in the city of Heet in Anbar province west of Baghdad, where army forces alongside Sunni tribes, are attacking Islamic State positions. The group made rapid progress across swathes of the country in June before being slowed down by a US-led air campaign that began in September.

But in Anbar’s capital Ramadi, the last major city in western Iraq not to fall to IS, the group launched an aggressive assault on Friday on Iraqi security forces, supported by local tribes.

“Instead of grabbing hold of it, owning it and then gradually transitioning back, we’re telling [Iraqi security forces] from the start, look, that is about you, this has to be your campaign plan,” said chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, the highest-ranking US military officer, on Wednesday.

Speaking at a conference organised by Defense One, a news website focused on US defense and national security topics, Dempsey spoke of a “different approach” from the 2003 to 2011 US-led war on Iraq that toppled and killed the country’s then president Saddam Hussein and left nearly half a million people dead. This new approach will be in line with President Barack Obama’s promise to a US public weary of foreign wars that US troops and security personnel will not engage in ground combat operations.

Obama sent 1,500 additional troops to Iraq on 7 November, bringing the total number to 3,100 American security personnel in Iraq mandated to work with local forces in an advisory role.

Dempsey said Iraq has a better chance of success because American troops are playing a supporting role to troops from the beginning of the campaign.

But some analysts question Dempsey’s version. It’s “highly debatable whether the US is in a better position,” said Kirk Sowell, publisher of Inside Iraqi Politics, a fortnightly newsletter. Generals who speak to the media tend to emphasise a positive situation on the ground, added Sowell. “It’s a lot messier than that quote of his.”

Fighting back IS control

On Thursday, US-led airstrikes killed four IS leaders, including head of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Radwan Talib. Mosul has been under IS control since the 10 June, after which the group overran the surrounding the country’s northwestern Nineveh province and other territory.

The US gain follows an Iraqi military success against IS earlier this month in the northern Iraqi city of Baiji where forces broke an IS siege of the country’s largest refinery – six months after Iraqi troops began their attempt to take it back.

“It’s not good news that it took six months to go a few hundred miles from Baghdad,” Sowell said.

Lawrence Korb, former US Assistant Secretary of Defence, now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, acknowledged this. “It’s slow, but it’s steady,” he told Middle East Eye by phone.

In spite of recent setbacks, IS still controls or has presence in nearly a third of Iraq following an intense US-led bombing campaign which has seen at least 480 confirmed airstrikes in the country.

Parts of western Iraq remain under IS control, including the majority of Fallujah, only 69 kilometres west of Baghdad. A gateway towards the capital, Fallujah is one strategic tip in the ‘Sunni triangle’ controlled by IS in Iraq. Stretching northwards to Mosul and back down to the town of Qaim on the Syria-Iraq border, IS fighters lay claim to a vast geographic area that knocks on the door of Iraq’s northern Kurdish region.

The marauding group have also established a ring of influence around their prized goal, Baghdad.

On Thursday, IS official spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani issued an audio statement, urging his fighters to march on Baghdad, according to Al-Arabiya. He said that the battle would also “rage” in Karbala, a holy Shia city southwest of the capital in an area of the country largely under the control of Iraqi security forces.

The Shia militias

Though a number of towns have been taken back from IS by the US-advised Iraqi national army, including areas in the northern Nineveh plains, where Christians and other minorities fled as IS approached, a “high percentage” of the fighting to secure these areas has been carried out by Shia militias fighting separately, Sowell said.

While some of Iraq’s security forces include both Shias, who make up the majority of Iraq’s citizens, and minority Sunnis, many Shia militias are under Iranian command. These include the Peace Brigades, the name of the Mahdi army faithful to leading Iraqi Shia figure Muqtada al-Sadr, and a Mahdi army offshoot, the Hezbollah Battalions.

In Baiji, where IS fighters were pushed back this week under the cover of US air power, the Iraqi army fought alongside Shia militias including the League of the Righteous, the largest militia backed by Iran and responsible for killing hundreds of US soldiers between 2006-2011.

In June, hundreds of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – an elite force founded to protect Iran’s Islamic system - arrived in Iraq. Later in October, photos emerged of General Qassem Suleimani, commander of Iran’s Quds force alongside Peshmerga fighters in Kurdistan in an attempt to demonstrate Iran’s active presence in the fight against IS. The secretive Quds Force, an overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guard, is a key supporter and advisor to Iraq’s fragmented Shia militias, who are viewed as critical to protecting Baghdad and propping up Iraq’s army.

“Iran is going to be a factor in Iraq – it’s a majority Shia population,” said Korb. He added that the possibility of a nuclear deal with Iran will make a coalition with the pariah state easier to sell to the American public. Talks that resumed in 2013 between Iran and the six powers – the US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany - were ongoing in Vienna on Friday ahead of a Monday deadline.

Iran maintains that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, an assertion that the majority of world powers doubt. After years of faltering attempts at negotiations, talks resumed in 2013 when moderate Hassan Rouhani became the Iranian president. If successful, an agreement will lift punitive sanctions on Iran while also assuring the US and its allies that Iran’s capabilities can only be used for power generation rather than weapons.

A fractious coalition

Broader regional concerns were also on the lips of US Secretary of Defence of Chuck Hagel this week.

Discussing the fight against IS on Wednesday, he told American television talk show host Charlie Rose “we can’t do it alone. It has to be with partnerships. It has to be coalitions. We can’t impose our will on any country. That’s complete folly”.

In 2003, the US entered into a war with Iraq without the agreement of the UN Security Council after American officials announced that “diplomacy has failed”.

In September, ahead of the US-led efforts to coordinate a global response to IS, President Obama underlined the importance of an international coalition of the willing: “American power can make a decisive difference, but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves, nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing the region,” he said.

However, some suggest the coalition lacks a unified goal. “I think the problem is a lack of clarity on the part of everyone – the Saudis, the Americans, the French, the British,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a Saudi columnist and political sociology professor at King Saud University. “The only party who seems to be clear is Iran. Iran wants to keep Assad,” he said.

Iran has been a long-time supporter of Assad’s government, seeing it as a bulwark against Sunni dominance in the region.

That may be a reason for Korb’s assertion that the US is “pretending” not to be allied and coordinating with Iran in Iraq. “But we are,” he said.

In light of the prevailing climate, Sowell agreed that US officials may be trumpeting success in Iraq to cover over a fractious coalition. One serious schism lies between Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi government, which is pro-Iran, al-Dakhil noted.

The government of Iraq, led by Haider al-Abadi who came to power in September, maintains close relations with Iran, a rival with Saudi Arabia for wider geopolitical rivalry in the region. Saudi Arabia wishes to see the fall of the Assad government, weakening a broad coalition of Iranian clients that include the Shia militant group and political party Hezbollah.

The main concern for the US from the beginning of this operation, said al-Dakhil, has been Iraq, not Syria. He added that while the Saudis have been clear on Syria, the US position remains “fuzzy”– they don’t want to help President Bashar Assad, nor have they declared his removal a primary objective. Instead, the US has chosen to fight IS, a strategy which could inadvertently bolster Assad.

The situation makes it less likely that Turkey, a major party that has not joined the US-led coalition, will choose to join the coordinated fight. Turkey has repeatedly asserted that the Assad’s removal must be the priority of any Syrian engagement, a point which has created tension with its US ally. The US wants Turkey to secure its border with Syria to stop the flow of IS fighters and their affiliates travelling between the two countries.

“There is no integrated strategy for Syria and Iraq,” Sowell told MEE. He said that even if the US strategy succeeds in pushing back IS in Iraq, the group will still be in power in parts of Syria.

“The strategy, if successful,” he said, “may just get us back to 2013, when the situation was pretty bad.”