The Fall of Iraq's Anbar Province
2016; Middle East Forum; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2767-049X
Autores Tópico(s)Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
ResumoOn May 17, 2015, the city of Ramadi, capital of Anbar, Iraq's largest province, fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Soon after, the Iraqi government chose to send the Hashid ash-Sha'bi (Popular Mobilization Force) into Anbar to help Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) liberate the city from ISIS control. Thus far, the tactic has been a manifest failure.Conventional wisdom in Washington and other policy centers attributes this failure to the fact that Anbaris are largely Sunnis, hence do not trust the mostly Shiite Popular Mobilization Force enough to fight with it against ISIS. Yet for over a year, Anbari leaders have been asking the central government in Baghdad to increase arms supplies, training, and payments to the local security forces so as to enable them to fight ISIS, only to be turned down time and again.This response reflects the belief in government circles that they can replicate the success of the 2006 Anbar Awakening, which helped U.S. and Iraqi forces defeat al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and the domestic Sunni uprising through a Baghdad-run, clear-hold-and-build military campaign. This, however, is a dangerous misconception that is bound to cost Iraq dearly.Misreading the PastThe conventional wisdom regarding the Anbar Awakening is that U.S. tactics were largely responsible for gaining the trust of local Sunnis, thus enabling Washington to partner with them in the counterinsurgency fight. A surge of U.S. combat troops secured urban areas, then, one-time enemies became trusted, and locals provided necessary intelligence to root out terrorists and rebuild the local forces with more oversight.1Taking their cue from this analysis, senior leaders in Baghdad believe that the Iraqi Security Forces can lead operations into Ramadi, hold strategic locations, and build the requisite trust needed to gain control over local security forces.2 In Baghdad's view, if Washington succeeded in doing this without a deep understanding of local knowledge and customs, Iraqis should be able to do so with experienced Shiite fighters. In a recent interview, Hadi Ameri, leader of the Iraqi Badr political party and de-facto commander of the Popular Mobilization, made the case for this approach, claiming that in the fight against ISIS, it was preferable to use Shiite militiamen, who had experience fighting the Saddam regime along with U.S. occupation forces, than to try to train and equip tribal fighters in Anbar.3 The logic follows that if Baghdad is the patron of a new Anbar Awakening, then any future security arrangement between Shiite-led Baghdad and Sunni provinces will have greater longevity.Yet, if the Iraqi government assumes that U.S. counterinsurgency tactics were the decisive factor in the success of the Anbar Awakening, it will likely fail, not only because it lacks the political will to compromise with the Sunnis but also because the Shiite-led Iraqi government underestimates the differences between the political environment in 2006 and today. The decisive factor in the success of the Anbar Awakening was that al-Qaeda in Iraq was seen by most Sunnis, especially the Islamists within the insurgency, as a greater enemy than the U.S. forces. Nor was AQI the only enemy: The sectarian government in Baghdad, which Sunnis saw as a pawn of Shiite Tehran, was an enemy as well.In these circumstances, Washington became the lesser of three evils and the most willing to compromise. Since U.S. forces held significant sway over the formation of the Iraqi Security Forces and Iraqi government policies, Sunnis assumed that joining the security forces to defeat AQI and partnering with Washington would give them more power over Baghdad's policies in Sunni areas. With the U.S. forces out of Iraq, the ball is exclusively in the Iraqi government's court: Unless Baghdad is willing to hire, equip, train, and supply local security forces and make concessions on Sunni political demands-more jurisdictional autonomy, equal application of deBaathification laws, releasing prisoners-it will not be able to unite Sunnis to fight against ISIS. …
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