Iraq’s chaos makes our war there trickier
Canada’s newly expanded ground role in the Iraq War will be dangerous — more dangerous than it was under the Conservatives.
The CF-18s have been withdrawn. But bombing an enemy with limited air defences and no fighter jets of its own was always relatively risk-free.
By comparison, the Liberal government’s decision to triple the number of special forces advisers engaged in active training at or near the front lines carries with it a higher probability of casualties.
Soldiers understand and accept this. As Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance told my colleague, Bruce Campion-Smith: “We do danger. That’s what a military force is for.”
For those fighting Daesh (sometimes known as ISIS or ISIL) the immediate danger that Vance describes is hard enough.
What makes matters harder — and what Ottawa doesn’t much talk about — are the chaotic politics bedevilling Iraq.
That country is not only fighting Daesh militants and their so-called Islamic State.
It is also perilously close to splitting apart.
Paralyzed by factional squabbling, the central government in Baghdad is virtually unable to function.
That fact was underlined last week when supporters of Muqtada alSadr, a powerful Shiite militia leader, briefly stormed the seat of government in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
It seems al-Sadr, whose forces have fought U.S. troops in past years, was making a point.
A few days earlier, Kurdish peshmerga troops and Shiite fighters battled one another over an area north of Baghdad that is claimed by both.
The Kurds say the town of Tuz Khormato is part of Iraqi Kurdistan. The Shiite Hashd al-Shaabi militia says it should be under control of the central government.
The fighting between these two forces, nominal allies in the war against Daesh, follows reports of sectarian atrocities committed by Kurdish, Shiite and Turkmen militias against civilians.
As the Washington Post noted, Daesh wasn’t involved at all in these clashes.
It will, however, almost certainly be the beneficiary.
For Canada and other members of the coalition, all of this makes the fight against Daesh that much harder.
Canadian troops are training Kurdish forces for a planned assault on Mosul, a city controlled by the Daesh militants since 2014. But as Time magazine has reported, the much-delayed assault is hampered by tensions between the Kurdish peshmerga and the Baghdad-controlled Iraqi army.
Again the dispute centres on terri- tory: Should areas won back from Daesh go to semi-autonomous Kurdistan? Or should they go to Iraq proper?
This poses a problem for Canada. Like the U.S., Ottawa supports the concept of a unified Iraq.
But in practice, it finds itself training Kurdish soldiers who don’t view themselves as Iraqi and who might well end up fighting Iraqis.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan understands the importance of politics in warfare. He has said that the West’s biggest failure in the war against the Taliban was its inability to come to terms with the internal politics of Afghanistan.
Similarly, he has blamed the West’s failure in Libya on its inability to understand that getting rid of Moammar Gadhafi, without having a plausible replacement available, could only make matters worse.
Unfortunately, Sajjan does not appear to have applied the same logic to the war in Iraq against Daesh.
The west has tried to navigate the perilous politics of Iraq. The U.S. used its influence to replace a hardline Shiite prime minister with another who would be more respectful to the Sunni minority.
But the replacement, Haider alAbadi, has proven singularly ineffective. As the New York Times reported, lawmakers in Iraq’s parliament threw water bottles at him when he tried to introduce a new cabinet.
The man Abadi ousted, Nouri al-Maliki, remains in the wings plotting. And as Canada gamely tries to train troops, so it seems does every other major Iraqi politician. Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday.