Brian M Downing
In June, well equipped Iraqi troops trained by the US and other powers collapsed before a smaller and less well equipped force led by men who had little military experience until they plunged into wars in Iraq and Syria. Shadows of doubt have been cast on the reliability of other armies in the region, Saudi Arabia’s foremost among them. Training missions can get troops to shoot well and march crisply, especially in front of politicians and cameras, but they cannot ensure cohesion or prevent disintegration. Effective armies are based far more on social systems than on training programs.
There are four armed groups, of very different structure and efficacy, operating in Iraq. The Iraqi national army is organized as a modern standing army; ISIS is a warrior cult reminiscent of monastic fighting orders of the distant past; the Kurds are in an awkward middle position between guerrilla force and conventional army; and the Sunni force is an insurgency with strong support from the populace. The clash of these four militaries is decisively shaping the future of the country and the borders of the region as well.
The Iraqi national army
Iraq has had an army since the country’s inception after World War One. It showed considerable tenacity and logistical skill in the long war with Iran (1980-88) and surprised western intelligence organizations with its swift, though ultimately disastrous, move into Kuwait in 1990. The army, from inception to Saddam’s ouster, was dominated by Sunni Arabs who constituted about 18% of 2003 Iraq’s population. Generals and NCOs, battalion commanders and support unit leaders, were chiefly Sunni. The US disbanded the Sunni army shortly after Baghdad fell and a new Shia-dominated army had to be rapidly put together.
Rapidly building or greatly expanding an army is a difficult undertaking. The US discovered this during World War Two when its army grew from 260,000 in 1940 to 8.3 million five years later. Many talented people rose swiftly and performed ably and the war was successfully prosecuted. However, many people with ordinary or worse talents also rose rapidly. A postwar study conducted by the future general Ernest Dupuy admitted the problem. Countless veterans decried it in their novels, plays, and storytelling of inept and martinetish leaders.
The rapid construction of the Shiite army had several further problems that the US did not experience. Appointments and promotions were too often made on the bases of payment, connections, and loyalty to established political and military leaders. The Shiite tribes are even more fractious than those in the much smaller, less heterogeneous Sunni population. That makes for conflict across the ranks, from the general staff in Baghdad to the infantry company on patrol near Mosul.
Perhaps the most serious fissure is the presence of Sunni troops under Shiite command. The Sunnis are increasingly disaffected with the army and state and have recently demonstrated their attitude toward Baghdad by deserting or going over to Sunni insurgent forces, underscoring that Iraq’s viability as a dual-sectarian nation is increasingly dubious.
An officer corps based on corruption, factionalism, and cronyism cannot rely on the respect from the rank and file. Soldiers in line outfits are less willing to take risks in combat. Tactical operations will meet with hesitation and anxious looks, not with assurance and instant responses. Even well led units will suffer doubts as soldiers wonder if sister units can be relied upon to come to their aid in difficult spots.
Many Shiite look upon local clerics with at least as much respect as they do their officers or elected officials in Baghdad. A mullah in Sadr City might speak more authoritatively and command more respect than a battalion commander or even a prime minister. This is all the more problematic as many Shiite units were once urban militias fighting the Americans, Sunni militias, or each other, and they have been unsatisfactorily detached from neighborhood clerics and perhaps Iranian cadres.
The Iraqi military today continues to bear the burden of the Sunni past. It is still seen by many Shiites less as an institution of national unity and purpose than as a burdensome imposition, an instrument of sectarian domination, and a plodding organization that hurled millions of them into a protracted war against Iran from which a few hundred thousand did not return.
The Shiite have fielded effective armies. Hezbollah, the Lebanese politico-military movement, wore down the Israeli Defense Force in the eighties and deters it from further lengthy incursions to this day. Hezbollah has been critical in staving off Assad’s fall in Syria and even turning the tide there. Iranian troops fought back Iraq’s 1980 invasion and endured eight years of high casualties. As presently constituted, however, the Shiite army of Iraq has severe flaws that make many soldiers reluctant to fight. It is unable to hold the country together. Indeed, its failures are leading to national fragmentation and the reemergence of local militias as the only reliable forces – often the death knell of a state.
ISIS bands
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has demonstrated remarkable fighting ability in both Syria and Iraq. Despite its small size – no more than 18,000 – it put the better equipped and much larger Iraqi military into flight in the north and took several cities, including Mosul. Though its individual soldiers are zealous and its leaders’ goals are quixotic, they nonetheless operate as a disciplined force, not as dervishes or berserkers. What accounts for ISIS’s remarkable success? The answer lies in its ideological devotion which transcends many of the problems noted to plague the Iraqi army.
Salafism, the core of ISIS’s religious and political beliefs, is an austere sect of Islam that has significant affinities with, and ties to, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia – itself the creed of a warrior cult in years past. Salafism calls for strict discipline, a return to the uncontaminated beliefs of early Islam, resistance to westernization, and a struggle for personal purity. Many adherents are “lost souls” who come to the sect in search of discipline and commitment in their lives.
Acceptance of the sect’s creed entails a break with mundane concerns and personal vanities and the adoption of a commitment to ascetic discipline. Though most Salafis devote themselves to a personal struggle for purity, many seek to prove their faith through warfare. In recent years events in the Middle East have understandably cast considerably more light on the warrior side of Salafism than on the side devoted to personal virtue.
A disciplined and dedicated recruitment base augurs well for military efficacy and confers critical advantages over less motivated rivals. In many respects, Salafism’s discipline and commitment parallel what military societies and organizations have long instilled – in Sparta, Prussia, Cromwell’s Puritan army, Cheyenne Dog Men, and the austere communist insurgents in the previous century. Such people are more willing to accept the privations of military life, the authority of commanders, and the hardships of war. They are also more likely to accept the prospect of death in battle as the supreme act of faith and purification.
Members of the sect share a sense of community based on common beliefs, outlooks, lifestyles, attire, and appearance. This breaks down or overrides familial and tribal and ethnic antagonisms which have long weakened militaries and political systems in the Islamic world and which plagues, say, the Afghan army today, where Pashtun officers and Tajik enlisted personnel serve together uneasily. A Salafi fighter may be from the Otaibah of Saudi Arabia or the Murabtin of Libya, but parochial identities recede in significance while among the brethren, especially while in battle. To fight is to take part in a martial hajj – akin to that of the Prophet’s bands as they stormed out of Mecca and Medina and conquered a vast empire.
As a revivalist group, calling upon people to return to ways of the original believers of centuries past, Salafist fighters see themselves as akin to warriors of epochs past who have returned to austere religion then gone on to win great victories. The medieval Almoravids blamed past defeats on impiety and with their new austere beliefs, conquered an empire in North Africa and Spain. The Wahhabi religion inspired Saudi princes to arise, gather the Ikhwan bands, and conquer the Arabian peninsula. The Taliban began in the mid-90s as an austere religious sect devoted to suppressing banditry and warlordism before sweeping across much of Afghanistan.
Salafi fighters of ISIS, then, enjoy far greater unit cohesion than do their rivals in the Iraqi, Syrian, or Free Syrian Army. This makes for greater trust, higher morale, and more endurance in the face of the hardships that protracted fighting heaps upon them.
The Kurdish army
Kurdish fighters, or peshmerga (“those who face death”), have a long and well deserved reputation of fighting encroaching powers, from ancient Persian empires to Saddam Hussein. Lightly armed and trained by American and Israeli teams, peshmerga units tied down tens of thousands of Iraqi troops that might otherwise have been deployed against US forces in the Gulf Wars and against Israeli forces in the 1967 and 1973 wars with Egypt and Syria.
Last June, Kurdish troops rolled into territory abandoned by the Iraqi army in the face of ISIS troops then took up positions to blunt its offensive. More recently, the Kurds lost several positions to ISIS which had benefited tremendously from the capture of equipment abandoned by fleeing Iraqi troops. Recent losses to ISIS have called into question the mettle of peshmerga and whether or not many of them truly are willing to face death. The losses of a few towns in western Kurdistan are not as catastrophic as widely believed and the Kurds are in the process of retaking lost ground – with the help of supplies from several countries and US airstrikes. Nonetheless, the Kurdish military has problems.
The ouster of Saddam Hussein and subsequent disbanding of his army was celebrated in Kurdistan – perhaps too much. Kurds looked on, with great interest but with a certain detachment, as Sunnis and Shiites battled Coalition forces and then each other. The view from Kurdistan was that their erstwhile countrymen would be squared off against each other for many years and that it could remain aloof from that struggle and concentrate on political consolidation, economic development, and independence. The army was of secondary importance. It was a place for patronage and settling factional disputes by parceling out plum offices. The transition from guerrilla force to conventional army was pursued only haltingly.
The peshmerga won their reputation in small-unit skirmishes and harassment of Persian, Ottoman, and Iraqi armies. They did not try to hold territory, rather they were willing to withdraw to mountain redoubts and across porous frontiers. Today, as an autonomous region with hopes for independence, they do not have that option. They must hold at least certain areas or lose government networks, economic assets, and public trust. Accordingly, there is an ongoing transition from an array of guerrilla bands to a regular army directed by the general staff and government in Erbil. Formerly disparate units must work together in maneuvers, feints, and coordinated attacks. This requires a professional officer corps, not a network of appointees from rivalrous tribes and political factions.
The Kurds have complained that they do not have the heavy weaponry that ISIS has used against them. Not entirely so. This is an excuse to hide their inadequate organizational abilities and a transparent effort to get more weapons from an alarmed West. They have Russian light infantry weapons, antitank weaponry, Manpads, helicopters, and armor. They have American helicopters, TOW missiles, self-propelled guns, and even a handful of fighter aircraft. The Kurds simply do not yet have the organizational capacity to train soldiers to use them. Nor do they have the logistical and transportation skills to deliver them to battlefields.
In recent years, with the rise of Islamist militancy in Sunni parts of Iraq and just across the porous frontier with Syria, there has been an influx of volunteers into the Kurdish army and the proliferation of armed groups with only tenuous integration with the army. Among the newcomers are many women taking up arms, usually in local militias. Their impact on the present war is uncertain, as is their importance in bringing social change to a traditional society in coming years.
Sunni forces
Insurgents who battled US forces, then allied with them in the short-lived Sunni Awakening, at the very least condoned ISIS’s bloody bombing campaign in Baghdad and elsewhere over the last several years. Such a protracted effort could not have gone unnoticed by tribal authorities whose watchfulness rivals that of most intelligence organizations. Unsurprisingly, the vast Dulaim tribe was well represented in the state intelligence service, army, and security forces.
Indigenous Sunnis, especially remnants of Saddam’s army and state, served alongside ISIS troops during its recent drive into Northern Iraq. Indeed, ISIS could never have allocated so many of its forces to the recent daring offensive had it not trusted Sunni Iraqis in the havens of western Iraq, though that trust may prove unfounded. The Sunnis have been pleased to see ISIS weaken the Shiite state in Baghdad but they have no desire to be governed by Islamist zealots. They want a Sunni autonomous region in Iraq, perhaps even an independent state, but not a restored caliphate. The latter is not only farfetched but also an affront to tribal authority, which even Saddam Hussein needed to respect.
Accordingly, some indigenous Sunnis have begun to battle ISIS, forming an insurgency in regions that ISIS had found safe over the years. This new Sunni opposition to foreign jihadis has several partially overlapping power bases.
The former army of Iraq was Sunni-dominated until 2003. With the army disbanded two months after Baghdad’s fall, former officers, NCOs, and soldiers were humiliated, dispirited, and unemployed. Many were eager to fight coalition forces and the Shiites coming to power. Former soldiers knew basic discipline, marksmanship, crew-served weaponry such as mortars, and small-unit infantry tactics. Some knew how to make bombs – a skill they diffused throughout the insurgency which then spread to Afghanistan and Syria. Soldiers retained ties with many NCOs and officers hence a command structure could be assembled.
The Baath Party developed from an underground cell structure in its early days of clandestine activities against the monarchy. It retained the ability to return to its underground past in the event of being driven from power. Events did not refuse them. Like the officers and NCOs, the Baathists were driven from power and they too were eager to reassert themselves. They provided information networks and financial support for the insurgency – the latter based on strategically placed money caches and businessmen who’d benefited from government contracts. The former army officers and Baath Party officials have not begun open opposition to ISIS, though they are thought to be biding their time before doing so.
Iraq is based on tribal structures – Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish alike. They are the basis of much of the country’s social, political, and economic life and they are key parts of the insurgency. They raise and finance levies of young men to wage war. Elders also serve as political leaders, sending signals to the Coalition Government and now to Baghdad. It was tribal leaders who negotiated the volte-face known as the Sunni Awakening which saw Sunni fighters ally with US troops to fight al-Qaeda. It was they who felt betrayed when the Awakening failed to lead to adequate Sunni participation in the army and state, and it was they who then returned to insurgency and tentative realignment with al-Qaeda’s successor, ISIS. The Dulaim tribal confederation has announced its opposition to ISIS and awaits the proper conditions from Baghdad to fight it – autonomy.
Smuggling networks are key to insurgencies. Those skilled at surreptitiously transporting consumer goods and drugs can readily switch to more lethal commodities such as Kalashnikovs and explosives. This has been shown along the Af-Pak frontier, Chechnya, and Syria. The Iraqi smuggler trade enjoyed tremendous growth during the period of UN sanctions between 1991 and 2003. Anbar Province in western Iraq was especially active, bringing in banned goods from Syria and Jordan. Army officers, Baath officials, and tribal chieftains were well represented in smuggling networks. With the end of sanctions and the rise of insurgency, Anbar smugglers deftly switched their product line to the more lethal commodities.
Salafism is at the core of ISIS, the al Nusrah Front, and other militant groups. It is also important in less radical Sunni groups fighting today in Iraq. The crushing defeat of the First Gulf War led many soldiers to personal anguish which led many to the discipline, purity, and promise of the future at the core of Salafism. The same process took place after the Second Gulf War and the collapse of the Sunni social order. The ensuing period of despair and uncertainty had the same effect on the general Sunni population. War with Western invaders was a noble calling that promised integration into hopeful events unfolding before them in which they could take part. Salafism established common elements with ISIS fighters and perhaps more importantly with international Salafi networks extending to wealthy donors in the Gulf monarchies.
Sunni insurgents operate in a supportive environment. The collapse of Sunni power in 2003 and the ensuing Shiite ascendance had a centripetal effect on the Sunni people, binding them together in common purpose, chiefly against the Shiites. Sunni fighters enjoy local support in northern and western Iraq and in the Sunni cities around the capital. They have fought an insurgency against US troops and they are beginning to wage one against ISIS.
Brian M Downing is a political-military analyst, author of The Military Revolution and Political Change and The Paths of Glory: Social Change in America from the Great War to Vietnam, and co-author with Danny Rittman of The Samson Heuristic.