Unfortunately for the Pentagon, sharp-eyed American
journalists soon noticed something strange about its map identifying
areas of IS strength. While it shows towns and villages where IS
fighters have lost control around Baghdad, it simply omits western Syria
where they have been advancing in and around Damascus.
The Pentagon displayed some embarrassment about its
dodgy map, but it largely succeeded in its purpose of convincing people
that IS is in retreat. Many news outlets across the world republished
the map as evidence of the success of air strikes by the United States
and its allies in support of the Iraqi army and Kurdish forces in Iraq
and Syria.
The capture of Tikrit after a month-long siege is cited as a further
sign that a re-energised Iraqi state is winning and one day in the not
too distant future will be able to recapture Mosul in the north and
Anbar province in the west.
How much of this comforting news is true? Recall that
the loss or retention of territory is not a good measure of a force such
as IS using quasi-guerrilla tactics. Good news from the point of view of
Baghdad is that its forces finally retook the small city of Tikrit,
though its recapture was primarily the work of 20,000 Shia militia and
not the Iraqi army, which only had some 3,000 soldiers involved in the
battle. It was not a fight to the finish and General Martin Dempsey,
chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said IS only committed a few
hundred fighters to holding the city.
Success at Tikrit was trumpeted at home and abroad and
was to be followed by an Iraqi army offensive in Anbar province and
possibly an assault on Mosul later in the year. But, just as this was
supposed to begin, IS fighters attacked Baiji oil refinery, the largest
in Iraq, and Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, showing that they
retain their offensive capability. As of last Thursday, IS fighters had
seized most of the 36-square-kilometre refinery compound with only a few
pockets of Iraqi federal police and soldiers still holding out. “We have
very little food and ammunition, and we can’t withstand the suicide
bombers, snipers and rockets,” said a federal police officer reached by
phone by the Iraq Oil Report. “All of us are thinking of committing
suicide.”
What emerges from the latest round of fighting is not
only that IS retains the ability to launch offensives over a wide area,
but that the Iraqi army very much depends on rushing a small number of
elite combat units like so many fire brigades to cope with successive
crises. One source in Baghdad told me that the number of troops useable
for these purposes was about five brigades or some 15,000 soldiers.
Other published reports suggest the number may be even smaller at 5,000
men drawn from the so-called Golden Brigade, an Interior Ministry Swat
team and a unit known as the Scorpions. When these small but effective
forces succeed in repelling an IS attack there is nobody in the regular
army to hold the positions they have defended.
A key question since IS captured much of northern and
western Iraq last year concerns the ability of the Iraqi army to
reconstitute itself after such a defeat. Going by recent fighting this
is simply not happening, and failure here has important political
consequences for Iraq and the region as a whole. It means that IS is not
being beaten back by the regular army in its most important strongholds
in Iraq. As a result the Baghdad government is this weekend poised to
send Shia militias into overwhelmingly Sunni Anbar province to reinforce
the army. “We are under tremendous pressure,” an army officer fighting
in Anbar was quoted as saying. “We are in the midst of a war of
attrition, which I am afraid will play into the hands of Islamic State.”
He described their fighters as being “everywhere”.
The move of Shia militiamen, organised and in part
directed by Iranian officers, into western Sunni Iraq creates a dilemma
for the US. The Americans have been insisting that the militias be under
the military control of Baghdad, though how you prove this is another
matter. Washington had been hoping to repeat, if only in miniature, its
success in using anti-al-Qaeda tribes and communities against the
jihadis in 2006-08. Today this is almost impossible because there are no
longer 150,000 US troops in Iraq, IS has shown it will kill anybody
opposing it, and Sunni-Shia sectarian fear and hatred is deeper than
ever. The 90,000 Sunni refugees who fled Ramadi for Baghdad when the
fighting started found it difficult or impossible to enter the capital
because they were suspected of being IS infiltrators. Their fate is a
grim illustration of the degree to which Iraq no longer exists as a
unified country.
At the heart of the failure of the US and its allies
to defeat IS over the last 10 months is the problem that what makes
military sense is politically toxic and vice versa. The strongest
military force opposing IS in Iraq is the Iranian-backed Shia militias,
but the US imperative to limit Iranian influence in Iraq means that it
does not want to support the militias with air strikes. In Syria, there
is a somewhat similar situation since the Syrian army is the most
powerful military force in the country, but it does not receive US
tactical air support when fighting IS or Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda
affiliate, because a US priority remains to displace President Bashar
al-Assad. As a result IS is not under serious military pressure in Syria
and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has recently issued orders for
fighters to transfer from Aleppo to Iraq.
Wishful thinking about the strength of IS and other
al-Qaeda-type movements is not confined to foreign powers. Baghdad
governments are always inclined to believe their own propaganda or see
themselves as victims of conspiracies. Last summer the Shia leaders in
Baghdad had convinced themselves that they were the victims of a
conspiracy in which the Kurds were in league with IS. It came as a shock
to them when the Kurds were the next victims of an IS offensive last
August. In Baghdad last week the Interior Minister, Mohammed Salem al-Ghabban,
summoned dozens of journalists to meet him so he could blame them for
creating the conditions for IS successes.
The Pentagon’s misleading map shows the degree to
which false optimism dominates the thoughts and actions of the outside
powers in Iraq, Syria and rest of the Middle East. It reminds me of the
situation early last year when President Obama, in receipt of the best
information US intelligence could give him, dismissed IS as being the
equivalent of a small-time basketball team whose actions were of no
importance.
©
independent.co.uk