On the American Front Line Against ISIS

BY ROBIN WRIGHT

MARCH 29, 2016

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America’s front line facing the Islamic State is more than two thousand miles from Brussels, as the crow flies, and then another ninety minutes by country road from the Kurdish capital of Erbil, in northern Iraq. The trip to Camp Swift, in Makhmour, the forward U.S. base, can be deceptively pastoral. I was slowed by a flock of sheep and goats crossing the road to a grassy plain sprinkled with budding yellow wildflowers. A curly-haired eighteen-year-old sheepherder, Mustafa Maghdid, picked up a young lamb to show me. A woolly white ram played at his feet. Millions of Iraqis fled as ISIS blitzed through the north, in 2014, but a determined few have been reluctant to surrender their herds or small farms. Tales of ISIS’s plunder are rampant. There is little left, according to the war grapevine, for those who may one day want to return.

The farming district of Makhmour is also one of the areas where ISIS has used primitive but deadly forms of chemical weapons—mustard gas and chlorine—since last August, most recently last month. It’s also the place where a Marine was killed this month by ISIS rocket fire. He was the second American killed since the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, in 2011.

The number of American troops in the campaign against ISIS—Operation Inherent Resolve—has quietly escalated in recent months, to somewhere between four thousand and five thousand. (Significant numbers of personnel on temporary duty aren’t included in the formal headcount.) The Pentagon was in the awkward position of announcing the death of Staff Sergeant Louis Cardin, on March 19th, before disclosing that his group of two hundred Marines, from the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, had been deployed to Iraq a month earlier. Eight others were injured, three critically. ISIS knew about the new Marine station at Fire Base Bell before the American public did. The Marines were deployed to provide force protection—basically, artillery cover—for Camp Swift. In a familiar pattern, they were assigned a mission that the Iraqi Army is unable to do.

For all that is at stake, Camp Swift is a rudimentary facility, marked by a small, hand-painted sign, secluded inside a rustic military base run by the Kurdish Peshmerga. These fighters, many armed only with vintage Russian rifles, blocked the ISIS advance into Kurdistan in 2014 after tens of thousands in the Iraqi Army—trained and equipped with sophisticated U.S. tanks and artillery, at a cost of billions of dollars—fled, abandoning equipment and shedding their uniforms. In late 2015, the Peshmerga quietly opened their base in Makhmour, which is fifteen minutes from the front line, so that the Americans could set up their own shop.

I passed through the Peshmerga sentries and concrete blast walls that ring their base just as a toylike drone buzzed noisily on liftoff from inside Camp Swift. Warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition thundered above cloud cover. U.S. drones identify targets—ISIS fighters, arms caches, installations, tunnels, vehicles—that coalition warplanes then strike. The pace has picked up significantly in recent weeks as the campaign against ISIS, also known as Daesh, has escalated. The warplanes often hit more than a dozen targets in a day.

Inside the base, Peshmerga fighters were lolling outdoors on stoops or rickety chairs, in small groups, many smoking thin white cigarettes. “Daesh attacks mostly at night,” Zeryan Sheikh Wasani, the deputy local commander, told me. “During the day, air strikes can find and pick them off.” With its big windows and beige exterior, the Peshmerga headquarters looked more like a public school or apartment block; the building’s front door was unlocked. A row of armored Humvees—several with bullet-pocked windshields and machine guns on top—were parked in the gravel courtyard. The Humvees were provided to the Iraqi Army by the United States and then seized by ISIS after the Iraqis abandoned their transport in 2014. The Peshmerga later captured them in clashes with ISIS. The Kurds finally got their own American equipment—by fighting ISIS for it. “It’s our best matériel,” Wasani told me bitterly.

Camp Swift sits behind its own fortified walls, which are topped with big curls of razor-wire. The entrances have thick metal doors; small cameras monitor the periphery, including the Peshmerga. Inside is a maze of boxy little rooms—no windows—constructed of black-coated plywood. Colonel Scott M. Naumann is the commander of the 1st Brigade Combat Team in the 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, New York. He is the senior American in Makhmour. As I entered a tiny briefing room, he said, “If we take indirect fire, go out the door, turn right, then left, and head for the bunker.”

At Camp Swift, the United States is coaching, coördinating, and cajoling Iraq’s rival religious sects and ethnic factions to join forces for what will be the biggest offensive yet in the war on ISIS—the campaign to liberate Mosul, some sixty or so miles northwest. Makhmour, along with a second base, in nearby Gwer, is expected to be a key launching pad.

Mosul and Raqqa, in northern Syria, are the strategic centers of the Islamic State’s primordial caliphate. Mosul, with a prewar population of more than two million, is Iraq’s second-largest city and a former commercial hub. It will be critical to the political future and coherence of Iraq. The United States estimates that ISIS has deployed some ten thousand fighters—nearly half of its jihadi volunteers from dozens of countries—around Mosul. Raqqa is the Islamic State’s proclaimed capital, but it has only a fraction of the population, infrastructure, and resources of Mosul. Recapturing Mosul would be a huge psychological and military victory.

Officially, the Americans involved in Operation Inherent Resolve defer to Iraq in the campaign against ISIS. “It’s kind of like being the coach of a sports team,” Naumann told me. “We provide the best equipment that we can, the best advice we can on tactics and strategy, and on how to approach problems. When it’s time for the competition to take place, we have to stand on the sidelines. This is an Iraqi fight. It’s not an American fight.

“They do it on their timeline, too,” Naumann added. “We enable them, with drones, airstrikes, tactical planning. We offer a different perspective. We put those things together—and then they do their thing.” Naumann walked me through the modest forward-operations center, nicknamed the Bull Pen, where rows of U.S. troops (I wasn’t allowed to cite how many men, or even how many rows) monitor big screens and computers that track, live, what the drones see and what the airstrikes do. Unlike the current air campaign in Syria—and unlike the earlier intervention in Iraq, which ended in 2011—this time the United States has to get approval from the Iraqis to hit proposed targets. On more than one occasion, the Iraqis have said no.

The U.S. mission includes training and reëquipping the Iraqis, providing intelligence and airpower, advising and coördinating strategy, and, crucially, keeping the Iraqis united and focussed on Mosul rather than on each other. “We all know that if they do this on their own, it will be more longer-lasting . . . win for the future of Iraq,” Major General Richard Clarke, the commander of coalition land forces in Operation Inherent Resolve, told reporters last month.

But the same problems that undermined the first American deployment now threaten the second. The prospects of liberating Mosul—and then stabilizing it—are already bogged down in internecine politics. The disparate factions don’t trust each other. The Peshmerga are wary of fighting alongside an army that killed tens of thousands of its people and gassed Kurdish villages with chemical weapons during Saddam Hussein’s rule. The reconstituted Iraqi Army virtually collapsed under the current government. Today, both sides are less than keen about fighting alongside each other or, together, forging a viable Day After.

“Without the United States, we couldn’t work with the Iraqis,” Wasani, the Peshmerga commander, told me. “We told the U.S. we couldn’t trust the Iraqis for one second.” In the late eighties, Wasani lost pulmonary function and suffered damage to his corneas from the Iraqi Army’s chemical-weapons attack on semiautonomous Kurdistan. He suffered wounds to his head—he showed me where—and body during two other rounds of fighting between the northern Kurds and Iraq’s Arabs, both Sunni and Shiite.

In a rare breakthrough, the United States, in February, negotiated safe passage for two brigades of Iraqi Army troops, after they were retrained and rearmed, to deploy in Kurdish territory—at the Peshmerga base in Makhmour. They arrived, with new uniforms, advanced American rifles and matériel, and shiny Chevrolet Silverado pickup trucks mounted with machine guns. “People said it’d never be done,” Naumann told me. “The Iraqis said, ‘We’ll never get through,’ and the Kurds said, ‘We’ll never allow them through.’ But there were no issues. There’s a lot of right going on here, too.”

The Iraqis now have their own quarters, on the other side of Makhmour base. The Americans convene commanders from the Kurdish militia and the Iraqi Army daily. Sometimes they meet in the Peshmerga’s command center, sometimes on the Iraqi Army side.

“It’s a complicated place, no doubt,” Naumann told me. But he went on, “I’m not a parent. These are all adults. We sit around a table, lay out a map. They say, ‘We want to hit over here.’ We say, ‘This is what we know.’ Then we ask, ‘How do we work together?’ From what I’ve seen, it works really well. I know politically there may be challenges, but that’s not my issue. Local commanders are getting along.”

The political backdrop to the Mosul offensive is a toxic feud between the Iraqi government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil. In the thirteen years since Saddam’s ouster, a series of governments have failed to solve two existential issues: How should its quarrelsome factions share political power? And how should they codify sharing oil revenues in a country with the world’s fifth-largest reserves? In a tentative deal brokered in 2014, the Kurds were promised seventeen per cent of Iraq’s revenues, in exchange for just over a half million barrels of oil a day from its territory.

The arrangement soon crumbled. The Kurds claimed that the Iraqi government wasn’t paying. Baghdad charged that Erbil was not delivering its oil quota. The stalemate has deepened the rift, and left the Kurds strapped. Last year, Peshmerga manning the front lines went unpaid for three months—as did Kurdish government employees. Thousands of fighters took second jobs to feed their families.

Thirteen hundred Peshmerga have died fighting ISIS; another seven thousand have been wounded, according to the Ministry of Peshmerga. “Only one-third of our Peshmerga forces are now available for fighting, because they have to work elsewhere,” Najat Ali Saleh, the commander of the Makhmour front, told me. Payment—just over four hundred and thirty dollars a month for the rank and file—has resumed, for now.

The Kurdish region barely limps along generally. Civil servants’ salaries have been cut by more than half, because of the budget crisis; thousands have been laid off. Electricity across the mountainous region is sporadic, at best. When I spent two hours in the office, in Erbil, of Halgurd Hikmat, the Ministry of Peshmerga spokesman, there was no power; he was unable to turn on lights, use his computer, or monitor news of the war on television. He had three cell phones laid out on his desk, so that one would always have power. Erbil needs 1.2 billion dollars every month to cover salaries and services. It now generates only about a third of what it needs. Teachers have not been paid this year, leading to strikes. Schools in Sulaymaniyah, the third-largest Kurdish city, have been closed since January.

Meanwhile, the poorly performing Iraqi Army is getting paid. So are the Popular Mobilization Forces, an amalgam of dozens of largely Shiite militias merged after the ISIS invasion to protect Baghdad and other cities. American military equipment and support, even when intended for the Peshmerga, must also be channelled through Baghdad, as Iraq’s legal authority. U.S. officials claim they’re providing arms and training evenly, but Kurds claim otherwise. “Our share is small,” Hikmat said. “We have captured as much American equipment as we have been given.”

From Makhmour, I ventured closer to the front at Dogherkan, a small Peshmerga outpost of sandbags and cinderblock shacks on the fertile plains of Nineveh Province. A single helmet sat atop the forward row of sandbags; it was shared among the rotating sentries. Colonel Mahdi Bradosti pointed to a row of four farming villages on the horizon occupied by ISISfighters. I could see the black ISIS flag flying in the breeze from a building in Khalidiya (not to be confused with the larger town of the same name). “That village still has twenty-five people left, the next thirty,” Bradosti said. “We’ve had some clashes with Daesh from there. They’ve also hidden suicide car bombs in the village. We know from people who escape.” The closest Iraqi Army position, he said, was almost two miles to the rear. Bradosti’s unit was armed with rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and a machine gun. I asked him how old his Kalashnikov was. “Ninteen-eighty,” he said. A common complaint among the Peshmerga is that they don’t have enough ammunition.

Under American guidance, the battle plan for Mosul has begun to take shape. On March 24th, the Iraqi Army, with Peshmerga support, launched Operation Fatah (“Conquest”), an assault on villages near Makhmour. The initial focus in the weeks and, more likely, months ahead will be clearing out the territory on the road to Mosul. It is expected to be slow going. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi vowed to liberate Mosul last year. Now there is a widespread suspicion among both Kurds and Iraqis that it may not be completed this year.

“Militarily, you don’t just start rolling up to the gate,” Naumann told me. “You cut off supply lines, destroy capabilities, launch air strikes, generate and stage forces. There are intermediate objectives, and all that takes time.”

Despite the new joint deployment of Kurds and Iraqis in Makhmour, there are no plans to integrate their units. They are not expected to fight in the same places. Peshmerga generals told me that their forces will be deployed in the parts of Mosul where Kurds, Christians, Yazidis, and other minorities live—possibly a quarter of the city. The Iraqi Army will operate in the city’s Sunni areas.

The still-unresolved issue—if and when ISIS is forced out—is how the city will be governed, and who will do it. The Americans have tried to intensify that discussion, with only marginal luck so far, according to senior Western diplomats. Mosul will be the biggest test of coexistence, and the outcome may determine whether Iraq can survive as a country.

The Islamic State has recently lost ground—about forty per cent of the territory it seized in Iraq in 2014 and about ten per cent of its holdings in Syria. “Daesh is on the defensive. The Iraqis have gained momentum,” Naumann said. He added, “Daesh is still motivated. The enemy gets a vote. It always does.”

The most notable military breakthrough against ISIS, so far, has been in Ramadi, the capital of volatile Anbar Province. A Sunni stronghold, it is about a fifth the size of Mosul. ISIS captured Ramadi in May, 2015. The Iraqi Army retook it in December. The Mosul offensive is expected to require a force of eight to twelve brigades, or from twenty-five thousand to thirty-five thousand Army troops. The classic military formula is that an attacker needs a three-to-one advantage to break through a defender’s front. The United States and dozens of allies in the coalition have retrained and reëquipped only slightly more than twenty-three thousand—for the whole of Iraq.

General Joseph F. Dunford, Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged on Friday that he and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter “both believe that there will be an increase to the U.S. forces in Iraq in the coming weeks.” Proposals include sending in hundreds of additional Americans forces, many for retraining and for advise-and-assist programs like the one at Makhmour. They probably won’t be the last.