|
|
Follow the Middle East Forum
|
|
|
|
Related Articles
What Follows
the Defeat of ISIS in Mosul?
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of your friends to like this.
Originally published under the title "Beyond Mosul."
|
Refugees
from IS-controlled Jahala village leave for a government-controlled
refugee camp.
Photo: Jonathan Spyer
|
Nineveh Province, Iraq – Black smoke was rising from the Qayara
oilfields as the refugees huddled in the shade. They had arrived that
morning from ISIS controlled territory a little further west.
These refugees had come from Jahala village. They were Sunni Arabs. They
had elected earlier that day to risk an escape from Islamic State (IS,
ISIS) territory across the desert – a route ending in certain death if
caught by the jihadis. "ISIS have set fire to the oil fields,"
one of them told us. "The smoke makes it impossible to breathe. 12 or
so people every day need the hospital. It's impossible to stay."
So they had set out in the early dawn, just after first light. A convoy
of men, women and children. "The best time is before the sun rises,
when ISIS are sleeping. We used that time to come over."
Now they were exhausted, grimy, but safe. The Peshmerga fighters of
General Mala Mahdi were quizzing the men, looking for any indications that
they might be IS members sent to infiltrate the lines. It appeared that all
was well, however. After a while trucks arrived and the families began to
load their belongings. Their destination was one of the large refugee camps
established by the government of Iraq. There would be little by way of
comfort there. But there would be shelter, food, water – and a chance to
breathe air not polluted by the black smoke of burning oil.
The act of firing the Qayara oilfields in an area under their own
control exemplified the florid insanity with which the name of Islamic
State is associated. It provided no substantive benefit to the jihadis
themselves, and with a stroke rendered the lives of the civilians in the
area unlivable. The result was that Sunni Arabs, like the refugees from
Jahala, were forced to seek sanctuary with the Kurdish Peshmerga. The Sunni
Arabs, of course, are the very people in whose name IS wages its jihad. 80
miles south of the city of Mosul, witnessing scenes like this, the issues
surrounding the current war between the Islamic State and its enemies can
seem fairly stark and simple. But the seeming simplicity is deceptive.
Iraqi forces seeking to defeat IS
are divided by clashing agendas and rival traditions.
|
The insanity of Islamic State, and the imperative that it be destroyed,
are indeed fairly unambiguous matters. The reduction of the area of IS
control, meanwhile, is already an advanced process. The jihadis have lost
50% of their holdings in Iraq, and around 25% in Syria. The city of Mosul
is the next, looming target for the enemies of IS. It promises to be a
fiercely contested fight. The result, eventually, inevitably, must surely
be the defeat of the jihadis. After which, perhaps, the air around Jahala
will clear and its unfortunate residents may return home.
Unambiguity, however, ends when one comes to consider the state of
affairs among the various forces seeking to carry out the task of defeating
IS. Here, one finds clashing agendas, different and rival traditions, and
the almost certain prospect that the defeat of IS will ultimately
constitute only an episode in the wider story of conflict in Iraq.
Iraqi Security
Forces
|
Iraqi
Army soldiers on the way to the frontline, Makhmur area. Photo: Jonathan
Spyer
|
"I don't believe in Shia and Sunna, Kurd and Turkmen. We are all
citizens," said Major General Najim Abed al-Jubouri, as we sat in his
office at an army base south of Mosul. Jubouri is the commander of Nineveh
operations for the Iraqi Army and the officer commanding the Mosul
operation for the army.
Jubouri, slow of speech and with the measured and cool delivery of an
experienced commander, has an interesting and varied past. Graduating the
officer's school of the old Iraqi army in 1979, he was a brigadier general
in Saddam's air defense units in the war of 2003. Later, he began to work
with the Americans, serving as mayor of Tel Afar west of Mosul in the
period 2005-8. Then he made his new home in America.
Now he is back, commanding the army in Mosul, and still declaring his
loyalty to the idea of a united Iraq. "Politicians use sectarianism to
keep their positions. I don't believe in it," he told me. "If we
stay locked to the past, we'll go to hell. If we forget what happened,
we'll have a chance for the future."
The army, Jubouri asserted, has moved on since the disastrous
performance of the summer of 2014, when IS took Mosul and was stopped at
the gates of Baghdad and Erbil. Better training, better weapons, increased
motivation will produce different results.
|
Maj.
Gen. Najim Abed al-Jubouri holds a press conference on June 15, 2016.
|
Perhaps. But it has been a long and slow slog to Qayara airfield, the
hub of the Iraqi army's operations south of Mosul.
Jubouri, when he is not commanding troops for the Mosul offensive, is a
research fellow at the Near East and South Asia department of the National
Defense University in Washington DC. He has come a long way from Saddam
Hussein's anti-aircraft units. His paeans to forgetting the past, embracing
shared citizenship and rejecting sectarianism are certainly of the stuff
that his DC employers would be happy to hear.
They do not, however, reflect the sentiments of other, no less important
players in the area of the Mosul battlefield. They also do not resemble the
frankly sectarian nature of the Shia dominated government in which he
serves, which relies, in good part, on the efforts of Shia Islamist
militias supported by Iran. Jubouri will be returning to his home in the US
when the Mosul operation is completed.
The anti-IS forces arranged around Ninevah province, of which Mosul is
the capital, meanwhile, are a deeply varied gathering. And the Iraqi
Security Forces (ISF) of Major-General Jubouri are not the strongest or
most consequential of them. In addition to the ISF, the Kurdish Peshmerga,
the Shia militias of the PMF (Popular Mobilization Forces or Hashd
al-Sha'abi), the Sunni militiamen of the Hashd al-Watani (National
Mobilization) and even the Kurdish PKK, as well as US-led coalition air
power and advisers are all set to play an active role in the battle.
The Kurds
|
A
Peshmerga fighter at a forward position in Bashiqa, 12 km from Mosul
city.
Photo: Jonathan Spyer
|
The powerful Kurdish Peshmerga, controlling the entrances to Mosul from
the north, east and west, have a starkly different view to the
representatives of the Baghdad government of the nature and meaning of the
battle in which they are engaged. For them, the sweet words of
Major-General Jubouri about shared citizenship conceal a bitter history,
and a state structure in which they have no desire to remain. Though they
are at pains to point out that many refugees from IS controlled areas, in
particular from minority communities, appear to prefer Kurdish controlled
northern Iraq to the areas controlled by the Iraqi Army.
Senior Peshmerga commander General Bahram Yassin, speaking at his HQ in
Bashiqa overlooking Mosul city, told me that "The process of capturing
Mosul will be a stage in the achievement of Kurdish independence. President
Barzani has already started the process by announcing a referendum. Our
main goal is getting to independence."
I reminded the commander of a recent statement by Iraqi Prime Minister
Haidar al-Abadi urging the Kurds to move no further towards Mosul on their
own. Abadi had warned of the possibility of resistance to the Peshmerga
from the Sunni Arab inhabitants of the city.
"The Peshmerga have been responsible for security around Mosul
since 2003," Bahram Yassin responded, "And regardless of what
Abadi says, we are going to move forward...And we will have clear
conditions for taking part in the Mosul operation. There is a need for
clarity on who will control the city after the operation is concluded,
including taking into account the interests of minority communities. We
will not take part in a process where we lose many men, and are then asked
to leave the areas we conquer."
All Peshmerga commanders I
interviewed, without exception, spoke of the inevitability of a Kurdish
state.
|
In the course of a week in northern Iraq, I interviewed a number of
Peshmerga commanders and leading officials of the ruling Kurdish Democratic
Party. Not all of them expressed themselves in such blunt terms as this
senior field officer. But all, without exception, spoke of an imminent
independence referendum and the inevitability of a Kurdish state.
Yassin was concerned not only about IS, but also about the presence of
the Iran-supported Iraqi Shia militias in the Mosul area, and of their
agenda. "The Hashd al-Sha'abi (Shia militias) are a big challenge to
the future both of Kurdistan and of Iraq. Many of them are trained by the
Iranians. They receive support from the government. They are seeking to
secure an area in the west of Mosul. Which will be a channel to Sinjar, and
from there to Syria. They want to complete the 'Shia circle' from Iraq, to
Syria, and to Lebanon."
According to a rumor commonly heard in Erbil, Shia militiamen are to be
found among the Iraqi army forces, wearing the uniforms of Iraqi troops.
That is, of the troops of Major-General Jubouri, who dislikes sectarianism
and wants to forget the past.
As if things were not complicated enough, Yassin and other Peshmerga
officers accuse the rival Kurdish PKK of collaboration with the
Iran-aligned Shia militias in this task. They are deeply suspicious of the
presence of a few hundred PKK fighters in the Sinjar area, to Mosul's west.
Sources close to the PKK, meanwhile, dismiss these charges and issue a
counter accusation regarding the KRG's closeness to Turkey at a time when
it is repressing its Kurdish population. They note the vital role played by
the PKK in the defense of this area against IS in 2014.
Kurdish internal rivalries, in short, are also part of the picture
around Mosul.
The KRG has recovered much of its composure since the summer of 2014. At
that time, in a series of events which have yet to be adequately explained,
the Peshmerga failed to adequately defend their borders against the
jihadis. The result was that IS reached the outskirts of the Iraqi Kurdish
capital of Erbil, and launched an attempt at genocide against the Yezidis,
a non-Muslim Kurdish speaking minority resident in areas close to the
border.
|
Peshmerga
fighters at a roadblock, Makhmur area. Photo: Jonathan Spyer
|
The Peshmerga have now re-conquered all territory lost in 2014. In
recent weeks they have pushed IS from a series of strategic entry points
into Mosul city, and taken a number of villages across the Khazer river, to
Mosul's east.
Nor do they appear to have any intention of ceding any ground taken. As
General Mahdi in the Makhmur area put it, "We clean the area, we make
the border, we opened the way. Where we gave our blood, only with blood
will we leave."
It is worth noting that for the Kurdish Regional Government, the Mosul
campaign and the chance for military glory comes at a time of considerable
domestic discontent. Low oil prices are wreaking havoc on an economy geared
strongly toward energy exports. There is widespread unemployment. Salaries
of officials have been cut, in some cases by as much as 75%.
In this climate, rivals of the ruling KDP accuse it of seeking to use
the military campaign against IS, and the subsequent talk of independence
referenda and independence as distractions from more immediate needs.
Whatever the value of such statements, they reflect the extent to which the
KRG has moved beyond a sense of danger to its existence, to the extent that
the war against IS has become something of an internal political matter
rather than an issue of common survival.
Sunni Arabs
Under the protection of the Kurdish Peshmerga, but separate from it, the
Sunni Arab Hashd al-Watani (National Mobilization) force has also emerged,
but little noticed by the outside world.
A trip to their training base in the Bashiqa area is an entry into a
world generally held to have vanished. The officers of the Hashd al Watani
are all veteran commanders of Saddam's army. There, on the plains of
Ninevah province, in miniature, they have created a version of the military
culture they know. To enter their base is to encounter in all its faded
glory the once menacing military style of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party. This
comes complete with the suspicion and paranoia toward outsiders, the faint
but clearly apparent desire to convey menace and intimidate, and the
ability to step effortlessly into the language of ringing propaganda.
All rather offset, or rather transferred to a slightly surreal plane, by
the fact that these former overlords of Iraq are today able to assemble
their little force of 2-3000 men only with the permission and under the
tutelage of the Kurdish Peshmerga. That is to say, they are now under the
protection of the very men who as young officers they chased and harried
and hunted through the mountains of northern Iraq, when they were the
representatives of a mighty and brutal regime, and the Peshmerga only a
ragged guerrilla force. But if the Hashd al Watani officers were affected
by the irony of all of this, they weren't showing it.
The Hashd al Watani was established in cooperation with Barzani's
Kurdish government. But its training is being provided by none other than
the Turkish Army. Welcome to the changed Middle East. On the Nineveh
plains, a small Sunni Arab militia is being trained by the Turks, officered
by former members of Saddam's army, under the tutelage of a Kurdish
government open in its desire for statehood and independence.
And who is this strange arrangement being mobilized against? Islamic
State, of course. But then everyone is against the Islamic State. Their
victims are the bloody shirt that every party in Iraq and Syria waves to
establish their own righteousness. More meaningfully, the enemy of the
Hashd al Watani, once again, is the Shia dominated, increasingly
Iran-aligned government in Baghdad.
|
Hashd
al-Watani leader Atheel Nujaifi
|
Indeed, the best way to understand this strange but significant
initiative is that it represents a notable if tentative entry by Turkey
into the arena that Iran has largely made its own in Iraq – namely, the
sponsoring of sectarian political/military organizations in neighboring
countries intended to advance the cause of the sponsoring state.
Turkish infantry officers, a lot younger and fitter looking than the
superannuated Saddam-era veterans, are overseeing the training of the Hashd
al Watani volunteers at the base at Bashiqa.
The Hashd al Watani is the brainchild of Atheel Nujaifi, former governor
of Ninevah Province, who is strongly linked to Turkey.
Nujaifi, who I interviewed in Erbil, sees his force as an element in the
construction of a federalized, decentralized northern Iraq, divided into
Sunni, Shia and Kurdish areas. There will be "greater Turkish
involvement," he predicted, if no solution is found to the needs of
Iraq's Sunnis.
Nujaifi has been criticized in the past for statements apparently taking
a lenient view of the nature of IS rule in Mosul. He dismissed these
criticisms, but it is clear that his main focus is what he sees as the
intention of the government in Baghdad to create a sectarian Shia
government, and what this would mean for the country's Sunni Arab minority.
Like Bahram Yassin, Nujaifi sees the future of Mosul as part of a larger
struggle to resist Iranian encroachment in the region. The Iranians,
according to Nujaifi, wish to make use of Iraq's Shia militias to achieve
this goal. "Iran wants to use Mosul to build a corridor to
Syria," he told me, "and to dominate the region." The
Iranian intention, he suggested, is to "build a revolutionary
army" through the Shia militias. (an identical point was made to me a
year ago in Baghdad by an officer of the Badr Organization, one of the main
Iran-supported militias in Iraq.)
As for Iraq's future, if the attempts at federalism fail, and "if
the Kurds split and become independent, then Iraq itself will split. The
Sunnis cannot go back to the situation before 2014. But we hope this can be
avoided."
So both the commanders of the Peshmerga, and their junior partners in
Hashd al Watani, see the Iraqi government and in particular the Shia
militias aligned with it as no less a danger to their respective
community's aspirations as are the now retreating Sunni jihadis of the
Islamic State.
Mosul and
Beyond
|
Iraqi
Army soldiers on the way to the frontline, Makhmur area. Photo: Jonathan
Spyer
|
Where is all this heading? The offensive appears to be approaching. There
are reports of heavy military traffic on the Erbil-Mosul road. Leaflets
have been dropped by coalition aircraft over the city, informing its
inhabitants that the liberation of the city is imminent and urging them to
leave so as not to be used by IS as human shields during the battle. The
refugees are continuing to stream in from the IS controlled areas.
From the frontline positions of General Bahram Yassin's Peshmerga in
Bashiqa, the city of Mosul can be clearly seen. About 12 kilometers only
separate the Kurdish forces from Mosul city center, their final objective
in any assault. On most days now, the frontlines are quiet, just the
occasional mortar fire or the crump of heavier ordnance from further off.
The fighters spend their days cleaning their weapons, keeping fit, and
waiting for the order to move forward.
Various anti-IS forces are looking
toward the political, and perhaps military, struggles that will follow
the conquest of Mosul.
|
Much fighting and dying remains to be done in and around Mosul city
before Islamic State is finally destroyed. The gravity and urgency of this
task should not in any way be underestimated. The refugees from Jahala are
of the same flesh and blood as all of us, and this is salient.
But the eventual defeat of the Islamic State is looking increasingly
inevitable. And even now, before the victory, the various forces in the
"coalition" assembled to destroy IS are already looking beyond
the city, toward the political, and perhaps also the military struggles
which will follow its conquest. The Kurdish Peshmerga on the ridges above
the city are thinking about independence, the Sunni militiamen under their
tutelage also see little future for themselves in a united Iraq, the Shia
militiamen are serving the cause of the larger, Iran-led regional alliance
of which they are a part. The PKK are seeking to advance their own, rival
Kurdish nationalist project. The road beyond Mosul promises to be a
treacherous, complicated path, strewn with landmines.
Jonathan Spyer is director of the
Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
|
|
|
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment