America is building a Sunni army in Iraq to take on the Islamic State

BASHIQA, Iraq — At a small military base just outside of Mosul, a few hundred Iraqi troops stand at attention in three neat rows. 

Within a prefab office nearby, a group of US officials is sitting down with some local commanders. They make introductions and exchange pleasantries, before the Americans ask the question they came all this way to ask: “How can we help?”

When the US announced its intention to support Iraq in its fight against the Islamic State (IS), it did so on the condition that the government undergo serious reforms to reach out to the country’s Sunni population, who were severely marginalized under the sectarian rule of former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

US-backed legislation to create an Iraqi “national guard” — first proposed in September — was aimed at diluting Sunni support for IS by promising Sunni fighters, including tribal forces, weapons and supplies from Iraq’s central government. A former Iraqi National Guard force was absorbed into the army a decade ago.

It was hoped that these groups would recapture the Sunni areas held by IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL, in western Iraq.

But with the Iraqi government failing to make headway in the fight, and the national guard legislation languishing in parliament, the US has begun to work behind the scenes to train and prepare to arm Iraq’s Sunnis on its own.

Enter General Khaled al-Hamdani’s fighters — all of whom are Sunni.

“They asked me ‘what do you want exactly,’” Gen. Hamdani said shortly after his meeting earlier this month with the Americans, one of whom Iraqi officials identified as belonging to the CIA.

When an offensive begins to take back Mosul from IS, says Hamdani — formerly the province’s chief of police — it will be these men who lead the way.

“[The Americans] asked: ‘How can we help you with weapons, with supplies, with life here in this camp?’”

A State Department official described US involvement with groups like Hamdani’s as “encouraging and facilitating the outreach that has been underway by the Iraqi government to Sunni communities across Iraq.”

The official told GlobalPost that the national guard legislation is “a longer-term goal,” but stated that arming other Sunni groups including tribal elements “will be a ‘bridge’ to the [Iraqi] National Guard with these tribal forces eventually subsumed into the national guard once established.”

‘We’ll take it back in a month’

Dobardan Base, about 10 kilometers from the front lines with IS, houses a division of more than 6,000, mostly former Nineveh province security forces, including a 250-man “SWAT” or special forces unit.

At the compound, the unit jogged in formation from one side of the base to the other while the US officials were taken on a tour of the facilities. The US officials declined to comment, but one confirmed they were there to assess the needs of Hamdani’s men.

“Once we get all the training and the weapons we need,” General Hamdani said flatly, “we’ll take back Mosul in just one month.” The clutch of bodyguards and assistants hovering around the general nodded and murmured in agreement.

But despite Hamdani’s resolve, the means to launch his envisioned counter-attack have not been forthcoming until recently. That has a lot to do with the distrust between Iraq’s different sects — which has deepened since the Islamic State’s rise.

Many of Iraq’s Shia, the sect that dominates the central government and the country’s most effective fighting forces, partially blame Sunnis for the rapid IS sweep across the country’s north and steady progress in Iraq’s western Anbar province.

When IS fighters first advanced on Mosul in June, four entire divisions of the Iraqi army collapsed. Thousands of troops fled, thousands more were killed or captured. Many of the city’s majority Sunni residents, at the time chafing under the brutal rule of then-Prime Minister Maliki’s Shia dominated security forces, welcomed the extremist group.

According to a Reuters special report on the fall of Mosul, top generals in the city, short-staffed and undersupplied to begin with, anticipated the June IS attack and called for reinforcements. Their requests were ultimately denied by the central government. 

Since the fall of Iraq’s second largest city in June, Hamdani’s men, looking for a way to join the fight to reclaim it, have been largely ignored. Distrusted by both Iraq’s central government in Baghdad and authorities in the autonomous Kurdish region directly on their border, the men were denied the weapons and training they say they need to fight back against IS.

Things began to change this past week. On Dec. 7, a small shipment of weapons that was being held up at Erbil’s international airport by a tangle of politics and bureaucracy was delivered to the base.

Analysts and Iraqi officials say this follows a weeks-long US campaign to pressure Baghdad to facilitate the arming of the country’s Sunnis as part of an effort to retake territory from IS in the majority Sunni provinces of Anbar and Nineveh.

Outside Mosul, Hamdani's men received 30 heavy machine guns and 2,000 kalashnikov rifles, just a fraction of what Iraqi officials at the base say was promised to them from the Ministry of Interior.

“For six months we had been asking our government [for help],” explains the general, “and they gave us nothing, just tents and beds.” Hamdani says despite the initial shipment from Baghdad, he hopes the US will bypass the central government and arm his men directly.

“I always thought we will get weapons from the Americans before we get anything from [the central government], because the Americans, they are serious.”

Asked if last week’s shipment of arms shows the government in Baghdad is serious, General Hamdani simply replied: “No.”

There are dangers to the strategy being pursued by the US.

Arming Sunni groups without also incorporating them into the country’s armed forces, could, some analysts warn, further fracture the country by militarizing sectarian rifts.

“If there’s going to be a unified Iraq of any kind coming out of this war with Daash [the Arabic acronym for IS], this national guard concept is an absolutely critical element of it,” said Ken Pollack, an Iraq analyst with the Brookings Institution.

“For the Sunni community, this is it … if they are going to move forward and be part of a new Iraq it is going to have to be a highly federalized system, one in which [the Sunnis] have their own security forces.”

Relatively small arms shipments like those made to Hamdani’s men outside of formal legislation appear to just be “paying lip service” to US demands for a more inclusive security force, Pollack said. In order to forge a longer lasting solution, he argues, agreements need to be formalized through law.

“Someone is going to have to help the Iraqis forge a new power sharing arrangement,” he said. “There’s just no evidence to suggest that the Iraqis are going to do it by themselves.”

‘We just talk about guns’

As the visit last week wound down and US officials along with their security detail drove off in a fleet of GMCs, the Iraqi troops stopped jogging. The general’s bodyguards, shadowing him moments before, put down their weapons and lit cigarettes. The rest of the troops dispersed, some to lie down in the sun; others returned to their bunks in the neat rows of tents along the camp’s edge.

“The Americans, yeah they visit, but all they do is talk,” explains Colonel Ibrahim al-Hamdani, another commander at the base, leaning back in a plastic chair. “The US has been very slow,” he adds.

Like many of the men here, Col. Hamdani — no direct relation to the general — wants the US to play a larger role in retaking Mosul, to commit more trainers and directly arm the Sunni fighters.

In the meantime, Hamdani says the men spend most of their day preparing for the eventual Mosul offensive.

“We do physical training every morning,” the Colonel said between drags on a cigarette. “We run for one kilometer, you know, about 30 minutes, then we do stretching for 15 minutes and then we rest.”

When asked what the men do for the remainder of the day, the colonel replied: “Weapons training.” But when asked to elaborate, he reluctantly explained that because until recently the men had no weapons, “for weapons training we just talk about the guns.”

At a peshmerga checkpoint just down the road from the base, Kurdish fighters skeptically eye their Sunni counterparts. While both forces are fighting against IS, there is very little coordination between the two due just as much to decades of animosity as to tensions recently inflamed by IS advances.

“Even I wouldn’t give them weapons,” said one low-ranking peshmerga fighter, of the men from Mosul based just up the road from him. “Half of them, their brothers are still in Mosul and fighting on the side of [IS],” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press. “Giving them weapons is just like arming the enemy.”

Many of Iraq’s Kurdish armed forces share this fighter’s opinion, blaming Iraq’s military and security forces stationed in Mosul not only for facilitating the IS sweep across the country’s north, but also for directly aiding the group by abandoning weapons that IS later pocketed. Many of the men at Dobardan camp openly admit to abandoning their posts in June, leaving behind weapons and supplies.

Camped out in a temporary office above a hair salon in the nearby city of Dohuk, the deputy governor of Mosul becomes visibly frustrated when asked about the lack of weapons for men at bases like Dobardan and slow progress in developing an operation to take back Mosul.

“[The central government] says it’s because they don’t have the capability to send us arms,” Nuraddin Kaplan says from behind a sparse desk. “But I cannot say if that is true or not,” he adds, smiling.

Then he turns serious, and shrugs. “Honestly, it’s because Baghdad doesn’t trust us.”