By David Alpher When the city of Ramadi – provincial capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, and symbolic seat of its Sunni populati...
By David Alpher
When
the city of Ramadi – provincial capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, and symbolic
seat of its Sunni population – fell to an
ISIS assault, hard choices face the Iraqi and US governments.
The
loss is devastating, and not only because of the city’s size or symbolic value,
or because it’s another reminder that ISIS is on the march. The loss is
devastating because between Ramadi and Baghdad there is only one major city,
Fallujah, which has long since fallen to ISIS and has always been known as a
radical hotbed.
Beyond
that is the capital itself. On the Baghdad side of the provincial frontier,
Iranian-backed, Shiite militias are poised to move across the line to retake
Anbar.
Hard
choices about halting ISIS now and building a secure, inclusive Iraq confront
both the Iraqi government and the US and its allies in the region.
The
experience of working in Anbar
My
work for an international nonprofit organization first
brought me to Anbar in the summer of 2007, not long after the American-led
coalition had written the province off as “lost to the insurgency.” The push to
retake it by combining the efforts of US forces and tribal militias (the “Sunni
Awakening Movement” or Sahwa) had begun
earlier that year, and by the summer had gained traction.
From
that summer through the spring of 2008, I led a locally hired staff in efforts
to reduce the involvement of youth in the insurgency in the area of a city
called Hit, a few miles west into Anbar from Ramadi; in 2010, I returned to
Anbar with a different organization, this time to Ramadi itself, as head of
a project integrating internally displaced
people who had fled to the Ramadi district from elsewhere in Iraq. My
leadership role required understanding the politics and society of the area
well enough to effect change without also creating unintended consequences.
My
observations here are based in large part on my own knowledge of the region.
How
ISIS found a beachhead in Anbar province?
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Iraqi security forces defend their headquarters against attacks by Islamic State extremists in the eastern part of Ramadi in Anbar province, May 14, 2015 / REUTERS |
ISIS’
successes in Anbar province do not come out of nowhere; they come from long
history of negative interactions between the Sunni and Shia of Iraq and from
American and Iranian interventions.
ISIS'
beachhead within Sunni-dominated Anbar – that segment of the population that
either didn’t resist the extremist group or that actively facilitated its
advance – has its foundations in the way the US pursued the war in Iraq from
the 2003 invasion onward. The US strategy prioritized short-term stability over
long-term inclusive governance, and ignored the Shiite-dominated government’s
pursuit of that stability through the exclusion and repression of the Sunni
minority. That was followed by the sense of betrayal among Anbar’s tribal
militias and the Sahwa fighters, who had fought alongside US troops to retake
Anbar from the insurgency in 2007 and 2008.
Those
fighters were subjected to greater-than-average exclusion by the government in
Baghdad, ejected from or denied jobs that had been promised during the American
tenure, and targeted by Iranian-backed Shia militia violence. Many saw the
American withdrawal of forces as abandonment, and some have since joined the
ranks of ISIS' fighters.
That
was worsened by the Nouri al-Maliki government’s
overtly repressive and exclusionary policies toward the Sunni population, which
were in turn worsened by the new Haider al-Abadi government’s failure to
change those policies, and use of Shia paramilitaries – long a battlefield
enemy to the Sunni – to bolster the overwhelmed Iraqi army in fighting ISIS.
Anbar’s
Sunni population is very much aware of the threat from ISIS; the fighters under
the black flag have not met with an unalloyed welcome, but rather by Sunni
tribal militias fighting them street by street.
Who
is seen as the greater threat? ISIS or the Shiite government?
But while some of
the Sunni population sees threat from ISIS, allof
the population sees threat from the Shiite government and militias. ISIS'
combination of superior force and political beachhead has been amplified by the
fact that the group has good administrators as well as good fighters – a
contrast to central government failures with regard to basic services, which
has served it well throughout the Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria alike.
So
what happens next?
American
and other international actors, seeing one strategy in ruins, argue over what
to replace it with, and whether the fall of Ramadi represents a strategic
failure or merely a setback.
But this misses a critical point. The real question
isn’t about the strategy of the American administration. The real question is
about the strategy of the Iraqi administration
– not to defeat ISIS, but to build an Iraqi society and politics that’s
inclusive of Sunni and Kurd as well as Shiite.
Throughout
its years in power, the Maliki government could hardly have done more to
convince Iraqi Sunnis that
they faced a real threat. The new government, distracted by ISIS since almost
its first day in office, has done far too little to
ameliorate that perception. Instead, it has already used paramilitary Shia militias to
bolster its flagging regular military – the same militias that fought with
Sunni counterparts during recent years of warfare.
The
use of those militias, exacerbated by reports that they turned their violence
on Sunni populations immediately
after engaging ISIS' fighters in Tikrit and
elsewhere, has only added to the problem.
The
result: All the easy options are long since gone, and any strategy to defeat
ISIS will fail if it doesn’t address the underlying drivers of insecurity
and/or continues using the same tools that previously fueled violence.
Facing
the hard options in Iraq
That
may sound glib, but it’s also going to be impossible to rouse the will to
tackle the hard options until this tough reality is recognized and accepted.
Some situations simply do not lend themselves to easy, straightforward
solutions.
In
the meantime, those Shiite militias massing west of Baghdad on the Anbar
frontier are certainly capable of winning the initial fight against ISIS. With
more easily defensible supply lines, they can mobilize greater numbers and
greater firepower than the ISIS fighters now holding Ramadi. The US, seeking to
defeat ISIS as soon as possible, will likely add air power and perhaps even
special operations troops to the fight. The Iraqi flag will fly over Ramadi
again, however briefly.
But
unless an Iraqi-conceived and Iraqi-led plan for a peaceful governance – which
includes Sunnis – follows, the victory will be Pyrrhic. Those militias will be
seen – for good reason – as a worse threat than ISIS in the long term and at
least as bad in the short term by the population of Ramadi. The militias are
symbolic of more than a decade’s worth of sectarian violence, and while there
may be a temporary alliance against a larger enemy, that alliance will be
entirely ephemeral.
Two
key actions, short term and long term, are required
ISIS
cannot, of course, be allowed to continue its expansion or to continue holding
the territory it has already taken. But two things are required if Baghdad
wants to halt ISIS and also ensure that a civil war between Sunni tribal
militias and Shia paramilitaries does not begin the second the fighting with
ISIS is done.
For
the short term, the Iraqi government should ensure that any troops massing on
the Anbar provincial frontier are Sunni, with Sunni leadership and the full and
explicit blessing of the national government as such.
For
the long term, Baghdad will need to provide guarantees of inclusive,
non-repressive government and power-sharing for the Sunni population.
Iraq’s
government will need to lay out its own explicitly Iraqi strategy for
socio-political inclusion and power sharing -— something it has yet to do. That
strategy cannot be seen as either American or Iranian, if it hopes to induce
willing Sunni participation in a shared government.
No
American strategy, no matter how tactically decisive, will make a positive
difference in the presence of an Iraqi government that continues to do its
utmost to marginalize and repress the Sunni population. The US has been
reminded that imposed regime change is a losing battle – change needs to be
argued out by the Iraqis themselves.
A
successful strategy regarding ISIS would aim to produce a peaceful, unified
Iraq in which ISIS cannot find common cause. There will, of course, be a need
for some tactical action to dislodge the group and protect civilians in the
short term.
But
the attempt to “defeat ISIS militarily” without also ensuring that change is
the same strategy that scattered broken pieces of al-Qaida into the fertile
ground of Iraqi exclusion … only to see it grow into this new menace.
As will happen again, if we continue to make the mistake of bringing
defeat and forgetting to build peace.
This article was first published at The Conversation