At the beginning of last week, a full scale military intervention by a US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ looked likely. Under the banner of delivering ‘humanitarian relief’ to thousands of terrified Yazidis — who fled up Northern Iraq’s Mount Sinjar as the murderous brigades of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) entered their villages — US planes were flying 100 sorties a day and the Pentagon admitted to the presence of 1000 soldiers on the ground in the Erbil region.
The Americans have many reasons to protect Arbil from Isil. To start with, they have a consulate with hundreds of associated personnel in the capital of semi-autonomous Kurdistan. More importantly, since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the region has become a major oil producer, containing reserves equivalent to a quarter of Iraq’s total oil production capacity and currently exploited by multinationals Chevron and ExxonMobil.
The distribution of revenues from Kurdistan’s oil has been an ongoing source of controversy among Baghdad’s squabbling parliamentarians. In August, the central government in Baghdad sent its American lawyers to prevent a tanker filled with Kurdish oil from delivering its $100 million (Dh367.3 million) cargo to Texas — the Kurdish authorities had sold it without consent from Baghdad. Paradoxically, Isil has had no problems selling off oil from captured fields at cut price rates to clients including Syria and Turkey.
The West had many reasons, then, to escalate this week’s intervention in Kurdistan and both Britain and France expressed themselves willing to participate.
On Thursday, however, the Obama administration stepped back from the brink, announcing that relief workers visiting Mount Sinjar had discovered “things were not as bad as first feared”.
More likely is that US intelligence personnel on the ground discovered the full extent of Isil’s capabilities. Obama cannot afford another costly war, and especially not in Iraq whence all US troops were definitively withdrawn at the end of 2011. Any entanglement with the Islamic State and its Army would be dangerous, serious, and long term.
So, while unmanned drones continue to target specific Isil targets in the interim, the West is now casting about for local solutions to the problem of Isil and the threat it poses to US regional influence, its oil supply and its client state, Israel.
Nor is it alone in seeking to eradicate this newly-arrived and totally unanticipated scourge. As Isil has firmly established itself on a self-declared ‘caliphate’ the size of the UK on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border, old enmities have been dropped like hot coals. Now we find Iran and Saudi Arabia in total agreement and there is even talk of involving President Bashar Al Assad of Syria in a united front against the Islamic State.
The Kurdish army, the Peshmerga, is experienced, relatively numerous (around 200,000) and notoriously effective in mountain-based guerrilla warfare. The Peshmerga has been battling the Isil forces along a 1,000 mile (1,609km) front-line but is running out of weapons and ammunition. The West’s first step now, then, is to re-arm the Kurds and give them sophisticated weaponry to match their opponents’ arsenal, much of the latter captured from the regular armies of Iraq and Syria.
Another contributing problem, belatedly realised, has been the absence of effective central government in Baghdad. The resulting security vacuum allowed the Islamists to gain a foothold and then make rapid advances. The same is true in Syria where the extremists have exploited the opportunities offered by civil war.
Both the US and Iran worked hard to keep Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki in power for the past eight years despite his abject administrative and security failures, despite his corrosive sectarianism, and despite Iraq consistently topping Transparency International’s list of the world’s most corrupt governments.
Now the two rival powers have backed Iraqi President Fouad Massum’s move to replace Al Maliki with Dr Haidar Al Abadi. With great reluctance and much protest, Al Maliki finally ‘resigned’ on Friday.
Al Maliki’s game was up the minute the army Isil entered the heart of Mosul, and more than 30,000 of his own troops were defeated within hours. Isil has, effectively, deposed Al Maliki.
Al Abadi does not face an easy task. The devastation caused by the Al Maliki regime will not be repaired with good intentions alone, and to build up the kind of central government the country needs for stability and growth will take months, if not years. In addition, Al Abadi is from much the same mould as his predecessor: he’s Shiite, from the Dawa’a party, and, like Al Maliki, lived for more than a quarter of a century outside Iraq, in London. Will Al Abadi avoid repeating the same mistakes? Can he crawl out of the shell of sectarianism and embrace the full participation of the Sunni political class and other minorities?
Although both the Kurds and Baghdad will be fighting Isil, their differences will likely prevent what could be an effective and definitive pincer-movement against the extremists. The Kurds took advantage of the panic and instability caused by Isil’s capturing one city after another to seize Kirkuk and its oil-rich environs. They are unlikely to surrender these to Baghdad and will, instead, be looking to consolidate their long-anticipated independence.
Isil will not be easily defeated. It has experienced commanders, it has tanks and sophisticated military hardware, it has money, it has manpower and, above all, it has extremist zealotry, with every man desirous of death rather than fearing it. In addition, it has cultivated its fearsome reputation for murderous brutality as a highly effective psychological weapon.
The US introduced instability into Iraq in 2003 and, after eight long years, surrendered the country to the insurgency, chaos and fragmentation. Having removed Saddam Hussain, no care was taken to guide Iraq’s inexperienced politicians as they established their fledgling democracy. And now that the crows of Isil are roosting among the ruins of once mighty Iraq, President Barack Obama has made it clear that American soldiers’ lives will be not risked to dislodge them.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan.
