Australia key to coalition role in war against Islamic State in Iraq

A DECISIVE new phase in the war against Islamic State began this week.

Shi’ite fighters rehearse tactics before advancing into Bo Hassan village near Tikrit, Iraq.

AS a harsh winter lifts across the Middle East, the war in Iraq is hotting up. Northern spring 2015 will see a showdown between the self-described Islamic State and the Baghdad government, Kurdish forces, Iranian-backed paramilitaries and a US-led coalition that includes, as of this week, 300 more Australians.

The confrontation will be urban, complex and intense; nobody can predict the outcome, but it’s a safe bet that things are about to get very, very ugly.

Statements such as “Islamic State now controls a large block of territory”, or maps showing zones under its control, correctly emphasise the enemy’s state-building pretensions. But they give the misleading impression that it occupies a swath of terrain across Iraq and Syria. In fact, maps such as this one from The New York Times, produced (full disclosure) through fieldwork on the ground by my research team, among others, paint a more accurate picture.

They show Islamic State for what it is: a network of cities, many only partially controlled by the group and plagued by internal opposition, linked by narrow strips of territory. This network of connected towns amounts to a mesh of semi-autonomous city-states un­der the loose suzerainty of the self-proclaimed “caliphate”.

The cities are connected through commerce, transportation, population, electronic communications, trade, smuggling and organised crime. Connections follow rivers, roads and, in the case of smuggling routes, a network of pathways descended from ancient trading and caravan trails. Islamic State doesn’t control these routes, though it certainly uses them.

That’s just how things are in Iraq, as anyone can tell you who fought there last time around. Vast areas are sparsely inhabited; large sections of western Iraq, including much of the area Islamic State claims, are desert. The country (aside from parts of the south and much of the Kurdish region) is more a shaky confederation of urban centres than a uniformly governed state. This is hugely important, for three reasons.

First, it means the coming conflict will involve mostly urban warfare: wars happen where people live, and Iraq’s population is mostly urban. Urban operations are among the most difficult, time-consuming and gruesome that a military force can undertake.

They occur in a disaggregated battlefield that bogs armies down, breaking large units into small groups so that, instead of one big battle, you get dozens of fleeting close-range fights with a few people on either side.

Most engagements are over in seconds and the majority are fought at less than a 50m range.

Training a force for this kind of warfare, as the Australians are doing, is hugely demanding. Threats can come at any moment, from any direction, including overhead or underground, and there are no safe areas. Snipers, roadside bombs, grenades, flame weapons, rockets and mortars are weapons of choice.

Al-Qa’ida in Iraq, predecessor to Islamic State, used chemical weapons — detonating chlorine tanks among civilians — in April 2007 and booby-trapped buildings (including a girls primary school) as “house bombs”.

In Ramadi in 2006, a US patrol rounded a corner to discover insurgents using a road saw to lift the asphalt from an entire section of roadway, planning to turn a whole city block into one giant bomb.

Car bombs, including enormous suicide truck bombs, are a favourite of the group. Often the drivers aren’t volunteers: during the Iraqi elections in 2005, AQI tricked an intellectually disabled teenager into blowing himself up at a polling station, and we saw drivers in 2007 who had been chained into their cars, their families kidnapped until they carried out their one-way mission.

Islamic State in Syria — in battles in places such as Kobani and Aleppo — has made use of anti-tank weapons, suicide bombers, sniper rifles and mortars (along with beheading knives).

We can expect the same, and worse, in Tikrit, Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah, where it has had months to prepare.

Second, Iraq’s structure as a network of linked cities makes overlapping fields of influence among those cities strategically decisive. Obviously enough, cities have fields of political, military, economic and social influence: what happens in one influences others and affects rural or ex-urban settlements, and vice versa.

That notion is implicit in a crude sketch map, taken from the body of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AQI’s founder, who was killed in June 2006. The map shows Baghdad surrounded by belts of settlement. The belts — including Taji, a garrison town where we established the Iraqi counter-insurgency school in 2006, where Iraqi Army tanks and artillery (many later captured by Islamic State) were based, and where the latest contingent of Australians will work — lie outside Baghdad’s city limits, but are integral to the urban system, as they supply the commodities and workforce it needs and dominate chokepoints and supply routes that connect it to the outside world.

When I worked at Taji we were often cut off from Baghdad by ambushes and bombings; one US unit I worked with lost 36 people in its daily “commute”, running the gauntlet of the belts from Taji into Baghdad.

Back in 2005, AQI leaders (including Abu Suleiman, later Islamic State’s “war minister” and probably responsible for its revival of Zarqawi’s belts strategy) recognised they had too few fighters to capture Baghdad by assault. So they identified places and populations in the belts that they could target to isolate the city and bring it down without occupying it.

AQI used its leverage in the belts to push Baghdad into an escalating pattern of violent chaos in 2005-06, so that by February 2007 50 per cent of all combat action in Iraq was occurring in Baghdad, and the government had all but lost control of its capital.

As a result, the belts became a focus of combat for US and Iraqi forces during the surge, as we fought hard to win them back in what turned out to be the deadliest months of the war.

After the Americans left in 2011, the group by then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shaam moved back in and the belts again became a centre of ISIS activity and support. By mid-2012, ISIS had recovered enough to turn the belts into a “ring of fire” around Baghdad.

By 2013 it was operating openly, even holding a public parade in broad daylight in Abu Ghraib which, apart from being the site of an infamous prisoner abuse incident in 2004, is a town in the western belts with links to Fallujah and Ramadi.

The Islamic State approach — which we could call “control by interdiction”— has since been applied in Baghdad and across the network of Iraqi cities. It was central to last year’s break-out, including the group’s capture of Mosul, and well-informed analysts at the time saw the campaign as a re-run of Zarqawi’s old strategy.

Thus, cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit, Baqubah and Ramadi are important in their own right, but they’re also nodes in a network centred on Baghdad, an influence field that affects a wide area of Iraq. Whoever controls this network has a good shot at dominating the country, and right now that’s Islamic State.

In particular, Mosul, Iraq’s third city, the largest population centre controlled by Islamic State and a source for much of its extortion-based revenue, is second only to Baghdad in importance for this network of cities.

If Iraqi and Kurdish forces, supported by the coalition, succeed in retaking Mosul, we can expect Islamic State to mount a flexible defence, falling back where it must, bouncing back where it can, and re-infiltrating wherever opportunity allows — as in previous battles in these cities.

Finally, this all suggests that sequencing will be hugely important in the campaign to come. In 2006 during the Awakening, as Sunni tribes rose against AQI in towns close to the Syrian border, a chain reaction worked its way through the network of cities — to Ramadi, where Sheik Sattar of the Albu Risha formed the Awakening Council, then to smaller towns in the belts, then to Baqubah, 80km north of the capital, then to Abu Ghraib and Amiriyah in central Baghdad.

Abu Abed, the Iraqi leader who launched the Amiriyah uprising against AQI in June 2007, described the Awakening as a wave rushing down a river, and the resulting partnership between Iraqis and Americans transformed the war and almost destroyed AQI.

After the Americans left, the Shia-supremacist government of Nouri al-Maliki persecuted Abu Abed: he’s now exiled in Europe. He’s one of the lucky ones — many Awakening leaders have been killed or jailed, targeted both by Islamic State and by Baghdad.

In part because of persecution and the alienation of Sunnis from Baghdad, last year another wave of change swept across the city network of central Iraq, with town after town falling to Islamic State as the government and its military and police — hollowed out by nepotism, corruption and preference for sectarian loyalty over technical competence — collapsed like a rotten shed.

The focus this year seems to be on capturing Mosul, launching a direct assault on the city that has come to symbolise Islamic State control. This may not be the smartest move — the last three times (in the battle of the belts in 2005-06, the Awakening in 2007, and the Islamic State blitzkrieg of 2014) these towns fell one by one in a cascading series, each collapse prompting the next. It might make more sense to start elsewhere — Tikrit, then Fallujah, then Ramadi, perhaps, and Mosul last.

This would at least isolate the major objective, create a track record of success against weaker strongholds and build the confidence of Iraqi troops and Kurdish Peshmerga unused to heavy urban fighting against a dug-in enemy with tanks and artillery.

That’s not all that seems out of whack. For one thing, the coalition is telegraphing its moves against Mosul. The plan seems to be to launch a joint assault in April or May with 25,000 to 40,000 Kurdish and Iraqi troops, supported by coalition advisers and air power, assault the city with infantry, tanks, engineers and artillery, and clear it block by block against expected resistance from 1000 to 3000 fighters out of a total Islamic State strength of about 32,000.

Islamic State fighters are expected to barricade roads, booby-trap houses, emplace snipers and ambushes, and generally engage in all the nastiness mentioned earlier. I can say all this without fear of giving away any coalition secrets — because the Pentagon has already publicised the plan in detail, months in advance.

As if a major urban assault, on a scale unseen in this or any other war this century, weren’t hard enough, we’ve just helpfully told the enemy exactly what to expect. The charitable interpretation is that this is a bluff: an effort to convince Islamic State to surrender the city without a fight and retreat into Syria. If that’s the intent, it seems misguided — Islamic State shows every intention of defending the city, its morale is high and the cover and concealment the city offers may make fighting in Mosul safer than running into the open to be killed by airstrikes.

As it happens, the Iraqi government — now engaged, with Iranian backing, in an offensive to recapture Tikrit — has rejected the US version of events, with Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi telling Reuters, “I don’t know where the American official got this information … they absolutely do not have knowledge on this issue.” If this is so, there are deeper issues at play — and a disunited coalition will face severe difficulties.

Either way, it seems clear that if the battle for Kobani, on the Syria-Turkish border, was a taster, the battle of Tikrit is the first clash of the campaign, and Mosul will be decisive — but how we get there remains to be seen.

It’s also clear that this offensive is Iraq’s one shot to push Islamic State back. Going off half-cocked — by rushing the offensive, telegraphing punches in advance, sequencing things wrongly, or failing to put enough effort into training, equipment, buildup and air support — would be a disaster from which the campaign might never recover.

As the latest contingent of Australians arrives in Taji, their contribution could scarcely be more critical.

David Kilcullen served in Iraq in 2006-07 as senior counter-insurgency adviser to the Multi-National Force — Iraq. A former Australian infantry officer, he lives in the US and is the author of The Accidental Guerrilla (2009) and Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (2013), both published by Scribe Publications.