To get back on its feet, Iraq’s ‘rotten’ army needs leadership

The setbacks suffered by the Iraqi army raises the question: why a country that fought Iran for eight years cannot operate an army as a cohesive force? Alan Philps explains

Iraqi security forces stand guard in Najaf. Haidar Hamdani / AFP

Behind the headlines of air strikes against ISIL forces, there is worrying evidence of the continuing failure of the Iraqi army to resist the assaults of the jihadists, despite having coalition air support. The new Iraqi prime minister, Haider Al Abadi, told the BBC this week that the Iraqi army could defeat ISIL “if we have good air cover”. Reports from the battlefield over the past two weeks tell a different story.

Soldiers fighting in Anbar Province bordering Syria where large swathes of territory are controlled by ISIL complain bitterly about the performance and courage of their officers, and their inability to supply food, water and ammunition to army bases scattered around like mini-Alamos. Behind every defeat lurks a suspicion that the officers were the first to flee.

The most serious setback began in mid-September when Camp Saqlawiya, a base 70km west of Baghdad manned by some 800 men, was cut off by ISIL forces. Despite frantic appeals for resupply, the soldiers found themselves short of ammunition and water, and having to drink brackish water from the ground.

A relief convoy was endlessly promised and the troops thought it had come when two US-supplied Humvees driven by men in Iraqi uniform came to the gate. The gate was opened and the vehicles – looted from the army in June by ISIL and used as the spearhead of a devastating suicide mission – drove in and exploded. The soldiers were outgunned and fled on foot. At least 300 are thought to have died.

One survivor described seeing the bodies of his former comrades laid beside the road, all decapitated after death: “Only 30 survived. They have not even paid our salaries. We have families to support and this is how they reward us.”

The same situation was repeated on September 26 at the village of Albu Etha, near Ramadi, capital of Anbar Province, where after a four-day siege Iraqi troops were forced to flee on foot.

Details of these catastrophes are well known as the trapped soldiers, in the absence of proper command structure, were using their mobile phones to call for help – to generals, politicians, local governors and tribal leaders. Since then the survivors’ tales have been repeated on social media.

Shocking as they are, these events are not as bloody as an incident in June when 1,700 raw recruits were sent to their death at Camp Speicher outside the northern city of Tikrit. As ISIL forces approached the base, the recruits were apparently ordered to take off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes and walk out and find their way to Baghdad. Instead they were rounded up by ISIL and massacred.

The question remains why a country with a martial tradition that fought Iran for eight years, and whose military has been trained and supplied at vast expense by the United States, cannot operate an army as a cohesive force.

Ryan Crocker, former US ambassador in Baghdad, says it is a mistake to see the Iraqi military as rotten to the core. It is “rotten at top” thanks to the policy of the former prime minister Nouri Al Maliki of creating a coup-proof army by promoting incompetent officers with no battlefield experience who would not be a threat to him. With Iraq’s history of military intervention in politics and Mr Al Maliki’s background as a member of an underground sectarian party, he was always going to give more thought to his own survival than to a strong army.

Mr Crocker told the DefenseOne website he believes that America can help the new government put the right commanders in the right places. But what if it is too late? What if the process of sectarian and ethnic separation initiated by the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has gone too far to be reversed?

The reasons why soldiers fight and die are many. They may be inspired by a gripping ideology, a powerful historical narrative or the courageous example of their officers.

They may fight out of bonds of brotherhood with their mates, or to protect hearth and home from an invading enemy, or just for the joy of conquest. As a general rule, soldiers do not get revved up to fight just because a political leader elected in murky circumstances wants them to.

The formation of ISIL appears to be the culmination of a decade-long process where secular states established in the Arab world in the 20th century are being replaced by entities defined on religious lines.

This process is most advanced in Iraq, where the Kurds already have their own armed forces and the fist of the fight against ISIL looks more likely to be a Shia sectarian militia than the national army.

If the fate of Iraq is the terminal loosening of the bonds of nationhood that Saddam Hussein and the Baath party worked so hard to create, the country will look very different from the citadel of Arabism that it aspired to be under Saddam.

In fact, its army might look more like Lebanon’s, another force recreated and supplied by the United States that represents an aspiration for nationhood rather than a reality.

Due to its confessional set-up, Lebanon’s nationhood has always been a conundrum. The strongest armed force is not the national army but Hizbollah’s sectarian militia that, for all its proclamations of Lebanese patriotism, takes orders from Iran in the Syrian civil war.

It may not be too late to save Iraq as a country. The Americans and the Iranians clearly want to preserve it, and regional states do not want more instability.

But as the Americans increase their involvement in the fight against ISIL, they will be acutely aware that armies are much more than the equipment they fight with.

In Afghanistan, the Americans have just signed an agreement to keep 10,000 troops to provide a backbone to the rebuilt Afghan National Army. The Iraqi government has to find its own backbone, and then it might be able to create an army that works.

Alan Philps is a commentator on global affairs

On Twitter: @aphilps