How Mosul fell: Iraqi general disputes Baghdad’s story
Gharawi’s role in the debacle is a matter of debate. A member of the country’s dominant Shia sect, he alienated Mosul’s Sunni majority before the battle, according to the provincial governor and many citizens
Lieutenant General Mahdi Gharawi knew an attack was coming.
In late May, Iraqi security forces arrested seven members of militant group Islamic State in Mosul and learned the group planned an offensive on the city in early June. Gharawi, the operational commander of Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital, asked Prime Minister Nuri al- Maliki’s most trusted commanders for reinforcements.
With Iraq’s military overstretched, the senior officers scoffed at the request. Diplomats in Baghdad also passed along intelligence of an attack, only to be told that Iraqi Special Forces were in Mosul and could handle any scenario.
On June 4, federal police in Mosul under Gharawi’s command cornered Islamic State’s military leader in Iraq, who blew himself up rather than surrendering. Gharawi hoped the death might avert an attack. He was wrong.
At 2: 30 am on June 6, Gharawi and his men returned to their operations room after an inspection of checkpoints in the city of two million. At that moment, convoys of pickup trucks were advancing from the west, driving across the desert that straddles Iraq’s border with Syria. Each vehicle held up to four IS fighters. The convoys shot their way through the two- man checkpoints into the city.
By 3: 30 am, the militants were fighting inside Mosul. Within three days the Iraqi army would abandon the country’s second- biggest city to its attackers. The loss triggered a series of events that continues to reshape Iraq months later.
It unleashed a two- day charge by IS to within 95 miles ( 153 km) of Baghdad that caused the collapse of four Iraqi divisions and the capture or deaths of thousands of soldiers. It helped drive Maliki from office. And it pushed Western powers and Gulf Arab nations into launching air strikes on the Islamist militants in both Iraq and Syria.
But how Mosul was lost, and who gave the order to abandon the fight, have, until now, been unclear. There has been no official version: only soldiers’ stories of mass desertions and claims by infantry troops that they followed orders to flee.
In June, Maliki accused unnamed regional countries, commanders and rival politicians of plotting the fall of Mosul, but has since remained quiet.
Nevertheless, Baghdad has pinned the blame on Gharawi. In late August, he was charged by the defense ministry with dereliction of duty. He is now awaiting the findings of an investigative panel and then a military trial. If found guilty, he could be sentenced to death. ( Four federal police officers who served under Gharawi are also in custody awaiting trial, and could not be reached.) Parliament also plans to hold hearings into the loss of Mosul.
An investigation by Reuters shows that higherlevel military officials and Maliki himself share at least some of the blame. Several of Iraq’s seniormost commanders and officials have detailed for the first time how troop shortages and infighting among top officers and Iraqi political leaders played into Islamic State’s hands and fueled panic that led to the city’s abandonment. Maliki and his defense minister made an early critical mistake, they say, by turning down repeated offers of help from the Kurdish fighting force known as the peshmerga.
Gharawi’s role in the debacle is a matter of debate. A member of the country’s dominant Shia sect, he alienated Mosul’s Sunni majority before the battle, according to the provincial governor and many citizens. That helped give rise to IS sleeper cells inside Mosul. One Iraqi officer under his command faulted Gharawi for not rallying the troops for a final stand.
For his part, Gharawi says he stood firm, and did not give the final order to abandon the city. Others involved in the battle endorse that claim and say Gharawi fought until the city was overrun. It was only then that he fled.
Gharawi says three people could have given the final order: Aboud Qanbar, at the time the defense ministry’s deputy chief of staff; Ali Ghaidan, then commander of the ground forces; or Maliki himself, who personally directed his most senior officers from Baghdad. The secret of who decided to abandon Mosul, Gharawi says, lies with these three men. Gharawi says a decision by Ghaidan and Qanbar to leave Mosul’s western bank sparked mass deser- tions as soldiers assumed their commanders had fled. A senior Iraqi military official backs that assertion.
None of the three men have commented publicly on their decisions in Mosul. Maliki has declined Reuters requests for an interview for this article. Qanbar has not responded, while Ghaidan could not be reached.
Lieutenant General Qassim Atta, a military spokesman with close ties to Maliki, told Reuters last week that Gharawi “above all others ... failed in his role as commander.” The rest, he said, “will be revealed before the judiciary.”
In many ways, Gharawi’s story is a window into Iraq. The Shia general has been a key figure since 2003, when the Shias began gaining power after the United States toppled Saddam Hussein and his Sunni- dominated Baath Party. Shia leaders once saluted Gharawi as a hero, while Sunnis see him as a murderer who used Iraq’s war on extremism as a cover for extorting money from businesses and menacing innocent people with arrests and killings.
Gharawi rose through a military riven by sectarian splits, corruption and politics. He is now trapped by those same forces. The decision to punish him and ignore the role of higher- level figures shows not just that rebuilding the military will be difficult, but also why the country risks breakup. As Mosul proved, the Iraqi Army is a failed institution at the heart of a failing state.
Gharawi, in his own telling, has become a scapegoat, a victim of the deal- making and alliances that keep Iraq’s political and military elite in place. Ghaidan and Qanbar, longtime confidantes of Maliki, have been dispatched to a pensioned retirement. Gharawi, who is living in his home town in the south of Iraq, says his bosses are pinning the faults of a broken system on him.
“They want just to save themselves from these accusations,” he told Reuters during a visit to Baghdad two weeks ago. “The investigation should include the highest commanders and leadership ... Everyone should say what they have, so the people know.”
Gharawi expected Mosul to be hell. In the years after the US- led invasion of Iraq, the city had become an epicenter for the Al Qaeda and Sunni insurgency. Former Baathists and military commanders lived in the province of Nineveh. The Kurds also had a foothold in the city; after Saddam’s fall they came to dominate the security forces and local government.
In 2008, two years after he became prime minister, Maliki began to assert his power there. Seeing the Kurds as potentially disloyal, he began to purge Kurdish officers from Mosul’s two army divisions and insert his own men to protect Baghdad’s interests. He appointed a string of commanders who antagonised local Kurds and Sunnis. In 2011, he tapped Gharawi.
The general was already a survivor of Iraq’s political system. Despite the fact he was a Shia, he had been a member of Saddam’s Republican Guard. In 2004, after Saddam’s fall, Washington had backed Gharawi to lead one of Iraq’s new National Police Divisions.
It was a brutal period. The Shia- dominated security forces — including the police — were connected to a spate of extrajudicial killings. The Americans accused Gharawi of running his police brigades as a front for Shia militias blamed for the murder of hundreds of people, mostly Sunnis. US and Iraqi officials investigated Gharawi for his command of Site Four, a notorious Baghdad jail where prisoners were allegedly tortured or sold to one of the biggest and most brutal Shia militias.
In late 2006, US officials moved to stop the killings, pressuring Maliki to dismiss Gharawi and try him for torture. Maliki reassigned Gharawi but would not try him. US ambassador Ryan Crocker recalled a near shouting match with Maliki over the general. “One of my many disappointments was not getting that sorry- assed failure,” Crocker said in 2010.
Gharawi says he did nothing wrong during that period and has nothing to apologize for. It was civil war, he said. The Sunni insurgency was bent on demolishing the Shia- led government. Gharawi’s brother was killed by Sunni militants. “We worked under special circumstances. We prevented civil war. We actually stopped it. Where are our mistakes?”
After his demotion, Gharawi bided his time, a gloomy figure in his dimlit Green Zone villa, decorated with old photos, including a few of him with US senators and Donald Rumsfeld. He was given a series of minor jobs. Maliki’s office regularly proposed him for higher positions only to be blocked by US officials. As the US military prepared to leave Iraq, Maliki appointed Gharawi the top federal police commander in Mosul.
There, Gharawi recaptured his glory. State television showed him standing on Nineveh’s sweeping plains in blue camouflage as he announced a successful operation against a terror plot. Maliki rewarded him with property in an affluent Baghdad neighbourhood. In his house in the capital on a short leave from Mosul last December, Gharawi sat proudly on a leafy green couch, surrounded by creamcoloured walls, a faux leopard skin rug, and shiny tiled floors.