Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
The U.S.
Military Is Back on the Battlefield in Iraq
March 28, 2016
It was
suddenly announced last week that the Iraqi army was taking territory from
Islamic State forces in what was presented as the first steps in an
offensive to recapture the city of Mosul. It sounded as if the self-declared
Caliphate was crumbling and was particularly welcome news since it
coincided with the Isis suicide bombings in Brussels. The message was that
Isis might be able to slaughter civilians in Europe, but was being
defeated on its home turf in Iraq and Syria.
I was
particularly interested in the attack because two months ago I had been
with the Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga in Makhmour, the town in the front line
between Mosul and the Kurdish capital Erbil, where the offensive by the
15th Division of the Iraqi Army was said to have taken place. At that
time, local Kurdish commanders said that there was little fighting and
they did not expect an offensive to recapture Mosul, which Isis had
captured in June 2014, to happen any time soon.
Several
weeks later in February, I was travelling on the main road between Baghdad
and Kirkuk when I was held up by a large convoy of military vehicles
moving north. I asked what was happening and was told that this was the
15th Division heading for Makhmour with the long term intention of joining
an Iraqi army-Kurdish Peshmerga assault on Mosul. It did not appear that
this was imminent since I did not see any tanks and most of the divisions
vehicles were soft-skinned or lightly armored Humvees.
Back in
Baghdad, I asked several senior officials about recapturing Mosul and
they all downplayed the idea that this would take place before the
end of 2016. It may have been that they knew more than they were
saying about what had happened to the 15th Division, said to be
4,500-strong and to be one of the better units in the Iraqi army, in
the days immediately after I had seen it on the road.
What had
really occurred at Makhmour is significant because it shows the continuing
weakness of the Iraqi military as well as the extent to which U.S.
military troops are returning to the battlefield in Iraq in far greater
numbers than the U.S. administration has been willing to admit.
The
15th Division had indeed established a base near Makhmour where its
arrival was greeted by the Iraqi Defense Minister Khalid al-Obaidi. But
Nancy Youssef writing in The Daily Beast cites three U.S.
defense officials as saying that the Iraqi soldiers had then come under
sustained attack from IS fighters and had fled into the mountains,
largely abandoning their base. One of the officials is quoted as saying that
“they dispersed into the mountains out of an abundance of caution.” Only a
few headquarters units stayed behind dug in at the base.
At this
point, the U.S. military took an important decision to send its own troops
to prop up the Iraqi forces in and around Makhmour. Without any pubic
admission or even telling the families of the U.S. soldiers involved, they
sent 200 Marines from the Marine Expeditionary Unit with four artillery
units to the by now largely abandoned base. Their arrival was wholly
contrary to the impression the Pentagon had previously given that U.S.
soldiers in Iraq are limited in number and not engaged in front
line combat duties. Though the Marines were within rocket range of Isis
ten miles away, they were not added to the official U.S. roster of 3,870
troops in Iraq because they were supposedly there on a temporary
assignment.
The U.S.
public may not have known that their soldiers were back in Iraq defending
a fire base, but Isis certainly had observed the arrival of the Marines
and the artillery. They began firing rockets at the base, one of which hit
a bunker on 19 March, killing Master Sergeant Louis Cardin, a 27-year-old
Marine from California, and injuring eight other Marines, three of them
seriously. Two days later they made a ground attack in which two Isis
fighters were killed. At this point, the Pentagon was forced to
become more open about where Sergeant Cardin had been when he died and
admit that Marines were not just acting in support of the Iraqi Army and
Peshmerga.
The purpose
of sending the Marine unit into such as dangerous place was to revive the
morale of the 15th Division and to some extent this was successful.
Though U.S. defense officials spoke of the Iraqi troops fleeing into the
mountains, they may mean the ridge of steep hills behind Makhmour and not
the mountains further north. Last Thursday Iraqi troops supported by the
Marine artillery and airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition captured three
abandoned villages in the front line after an advance of less than a mile.
The episode
does not bode well for a successful attack to retake Mosul this year. The
Iraqi army has never really come together again since its defeat by Isis
in northern and western Iraq in 2014. Though it recaptured Ramadi, the
capital of Anbar province, which it lost last May the city is largely in
ruins with 5,700 buildings destroyed or damaged by airstrikes. The Iraqi
ground forces involved were limited in number and largely acted as a
mopping up force. This is an ominous sign for any future attack on Mosul,
since Isis is likely to fight for it to the last man and could only be
defeated if all the buildings in the city were systematically destroyed by
U.S. airpower as happened a year ago in Kobani.
The story
of the 200 U.S. Marines at Makhmour and the flight of the 15th Division
illustrates more than just the fragility of the Iraqi armed forces. It
underlines the degree to which the U.S. already has combat troops in Iraq,
while all the while claiming that there are no “boots on the ground”. Sergeant
Cardin was not officially even in Iraq when he died because he was one of
1,470 U.S. service personnel only temporarily in the country. Taken
together with the 3,870 officially there and 1,100 contractors working for
the Pentagon in Iraq who are U.S. citizens this brings the total to over
6,400.
The U.S.
military have been crowing over how their special forces killed the Isis
finance director Haji Iman last week and there is no doubt Isis
is under extreme pressure in Iraq. In Syria, the Syrian army backed
by Russian airstrikes is close to recapturing Palmyra, while the Syrian
Kurds have been pushing south in Hasakah province in the north east
of the country. All this looks more impressive on a small scale map than
when one travels for hours skirting the Isis front line in Iraq and
Syria which one Peshmerga general put at 3,700 kilometres long. Claims of
Isis losing control of important roads and supply routes are less
significant than appears because Middle East truckers are adept at using
makeshift tracks to bypass obstacles.
The speed
with which Isis responded to the arrival of the 15th Iraqi Division
and the U.S. Marines at Makhmour shows that they are by no means a spent
force, their enemies are weaker than they look and the Caliphate is still
far from final defeat.
[5]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/patrick-cockburn
[2] http://www.theind.com
[3] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802150276/counterpunchmaga
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The U.S. Military Is Back on the Battlefield in Iraq
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://www.theind.com
[3] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0802150276/counterpunchmaga
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The U.S. Military Is Back on the Battlefield in Iraq
[5] http://www.alternet.org/
[6] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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