End Game in Iraq?
By Brigadier-General G.R. Smith, Defence Fellow, CIDP
Originally Published: 28 March 2017
Conventional operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are approaching an end game in Northern Iraq. ISIL initially swept into Western and Northern Iraq in the Summer of 2014 capturing Ramadi, Tikrit, Fallujah, and ultimately the major city of Mosul. Equally, employing terror and exploiting Iraqi ethnic fissures, the warriors of the Islamic State seized vast tracts of land and large populations along the strategically important Euphrates River Valley (ERV) and Tigris River Valley (TRV). Advancing nearly to the gates of Baghdad, a modern city of seven million, ISIL’s advance was only halted through the efforts of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) including the Kurdish Security Forces (KSF), the Shia-heavy Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), and Coalition kinetic targeting.
This final action, led by the United States under Operation INHERENT RESOLVE (OIR), included the contributions of Canada and 51 other nations. Initially focused on the aforementioned air bombardments to halt ISIL’s murderous advance and the associated humanitarian crisis, Coalition activities broadened to compromise collaborative planning, providing Advise and Assist teams to ISF and KSF land formations, and the training and equipping of security forces at Building Partner Capacity sites throughout Iraq. These collective cooperative efforts of the ISF and its OIR Coalition partners succeeded in arresting and re-capturing considerable tracts of the approximately 40 per cent of Iraqi territory held by the violent jihadists.
This re-conquest has been far from bloodless and the ISF’s slow and irresistible advance has killed large numbers of Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters with ISIL. Similarly, at great cost to the Iraqi Forces, the Islamic State-held cities of Ramadi, Tikrit, Fallujah, and numerous other urban and rural areas throughout the ERV and TRV have been recaptured in grinding battles of attrition. The ISF, although possessing a poor brand as the result of some Iraqi Army divisions breaking and fleeing as ISIL advanced into Northern Iraq in 2014, has rebuilt itself and is now capturing the final symbolic enclave of ISIL in Iraq: Mosul.
Operations against the East side of this city of two million people began on 16 October 2016 with a collaborative assault by the KSF and ISF. After 100 days of urban fighting, the ISF completed the capture of East Mosul in late January 2017 and began preparations for the seizure of the Western half of the city. Transferring elements of the Iraqi Army, Counter Terrorism Services, Federal Police, and the PMF to the West side of the Tigris River, Iraqi Forces continued their re-conquest of Iraq’s second city in February 2017. Again, the ISF faces a relentless battle against ISIL as it advances house-by-house through booby-trapped Improvised Explosive Devices, snipers, re-infiltration tunnels, human shields, crude chemical weapons, and fast-moving suicide car bombs. In this challenging operational environment the Iraqi Forces and the supporting Coalition must contend with a battle space replete with non-combatants and an enemy prepared to rapidly exploit real, manufactured, or phony civilian casualties on Social Media.
Yet this physical, military battle is approaching its conclusion. The ISF is irresistibly compressing Western Mosul and approaching the Great Mosque of al-Nuri where ISIL’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate in June 2014. Following the fall of West Mosul and the clearing of some remaining Islamic State-held areas in Northern and Western Iraq, the Iraqi Government will once again possess loose control of its territory. However, Iraq’s larger strategic problems revolve around governance and not military competence. Although it will be important to secure the country against physical manifestations of a redux ISIL, this will only succeed if the Shia, Sunni, Kurd, and other ethnic and religious components of Iraq feel supported by and give their allegiance to the central government in Baghdad. This is a political, economic, and communications problem that must be resolved by continued efforts at an inclusive, competent, and representative Iraqi federal government.
Moreover, there is widespread appreciation of the need for continued, international assistance in Baghdad to achieve this. Although the United States and the Western world largely walked away from Iraq in 2011, Iraqis recognize the requirement for assistance in the post-ISIL era. With many neighbouring countries possessing national interests in Iraq and its population, a suitable post-conflict international construct must be established to enable governance and economic development in this troubled country. The United States, Iraq, and potentially Canada must decide upon and negotiate such future engagement to rehabilitate this fragile state and prevent an ISIL 2.0.
