The Decrepit State of the Iraqi Military

Sam Jones and Borzou Daragahi

Financial Times

July 10, 2014

Iraq’s security forces ill-equipped to face militants

On paper, Iraq’s security forces are among the most powerful in the Middle East. With more than 271,000 men, they are bettered in size only by those of Egypt and Iran.

In practice, though, as months of an increasingly virulent jihadi insurgency have shown, they are among the weakest: morale-sapped and unled.

The elite training ISF officers took at the Al-Rustamiyah academy, based on the British Army’s Sandhurst, has come to naught. In Mosul, last month, as militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) advanced on the city, they abandoned their troops in the night.

The ISF’s arsenal of high-grade equipment supplied by the US and Nato allies – 336 tanks, 140 of which are M1A1 Abrams; 3600 armoured personnel carriers; 1300 artillery pieces – is, meanwhile, proving little more than a mobile storefront for Isis to loot.

“It’s an army of power point warriors,” says Afzal Ashraf, a former British diplomat and air force captain who advised the Iraqi government on the creation and training of the ISF. Mr Ashraf is now a consultant fellow at the military think-tank RUSI.

“Even when we were creating the forces under Petraeus, military planners would show figures and slides and statistics of the size of the ISF that did not show any real indication of capability. Quantitative measures of fighting forces are pretty useless – especially new forces,” he adds.

Most of the ISF forces are deployed around the capital and the South. The sixth division is charged with the defence of Baghdad’s West. To the east, the ninth. They are holding ground – but only just. Isis’s long-practised tactics continue to draw a toll: the commander of the sixth, general Najim Abdullah was killed in an insurgent attack on Sunday.

North of Baghdad, ISF forces deployed to defend Tikrit, now holed up in Camp Speicher north of the city, came under renewed attack from Isis on Tuesday, while other Isis forces moved on Muqdadiyah, north east of the capital, and took the Sudur dam too raising the prospect of ISF deployments in Samarra and Tikrit being encircled.

In Baghdad itself, a city preparing itself for front line fighting, the discipline and mood among the ranks of the city’s defenders is no better than elsewhere.

ISF forces can be seen careening down boulevards in convoys of gigantic US-made pickup trucks, some with high-calibre guns mounted on their flatbeds and resemble militias more than regular, disciplined units.

“We haven’t had a break for weeks,” says one soldier guarding the entrance to the heavily fortified Green Zone. “We’re really suffering here,” adds another, complaining of long hours, poor living conditions and outdated equipment.

The official government line is far different. A constant flood of pro-military propaganda appears through state television and prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s al-Afaq channel.

“The ISF are capable of limited defensive actions. And in some areas they are capable of limited but not sustained counter attacks,” says Jim Dubik, a senior fellow of the Institute for the Study of War and, in 2007, the US lieutenant general in charge of overseeing the training and development of the ISF. “But what they are totally incapable of planning, preparing or conducting is a counter offensive of any kind against Isis that will push them back and retake territory from the insurgency.”

Mr Dubik’s view is shared by many military analysts and current military officers.

In the next few days, six assessment teams dispatched by the Pentagon to Baghdad and Erbil will report on their assessment of the ISF’s disposition and capabilities. The picture will be “grim” says one Nato military intelligence officer.

In three operational areas the ISF has seen its capabilities degraded, according to Mr Dubik: “The systems that supply and support the combat soldiers – intelligence, logistics and personnel management – have atrophied.”

Low morale . . . poor discipline – these are symptoms of a disease which is actually a lack of national identity and leadership

- Afzal Ashraf, a former British diplomat

The effect of these has been to constrain the range of ISF forces’ fighting power. For example: without intelligence on where to strike, or the ability to strike at distant targets by air, Iraq’s elite Swat counter-terrorism units have been reduced to functioning frontline footsoldiers.

Beyond such operational limitations, however, are bigger problems of command that cut deeply across the entire military hierarchy.

At the top, Mr Maliki has completely undermined the authority of the traditional army joint chiefs by creating his own “office of the commander-in-chief”, through which he exerts personal authority. The move has completely eroded the army’s strategic abilities.

At almost every level further down the chain of command, meanwhile, officer appointments have been supplanted with dimaj – political appointees loyal to Mr Maliki but bad at their jobs, weakening the army’s tactical abilities.

The solutions to such problems will not be coming soon with or without the support of more American military planners.

“Low morale . . . poor discipline – these are symptoms of a disease which is actually a lack of national identity and leadership,” says RUSI’s Mr Ashraf. “Iraq’s soldiers don’t have a cause to fight for.”

The daily news conference of Major General Qassim Atta, the Iraqi military’s principle spokesperson, has meanwhile begun to draw unflattering comparisons as the realities of the ISF’s strengths become clearer.

Mr Atta, some in Baghdad point out, is beginning to sound a lot like Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Panglossian information minister under Saddam Hussein better known as “Comical Ali”.

On Tuesday, in perhaps the most far-fetched claim to date, Mr Atta said preparations were under way for the retaking of Mosul. There is little chance any time soon. The city is so deep in Isis’ zone of control that Isis’ elusive leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi gave a public Ramadan sermon there in the main mosque last weekend.

The shamming, one US military observer points out, is nothing new.

The Iraqi government has been “poised” to retake Fallujah, to no avail, since Isis took the city in December.