Spats among Iraqi forces delay advance on Fallujah, revealing military’s faults

NAYMIYAH, Iraq — After securing the southern edge of militant-held Fallujah, seven battalions of Iraqi special forces units have been unable to advance for two days — a delay that commanders say isn’t due to counterattacks or difficult terrain, but rather to disagreements about battlefield strategy among the disparate Iraqi forces fighting the Islamic State group.

Unlike previous anti-IS operations, the fight for Fallujah involves an array of Iraqi security forces. A battle plan that was initially cast as an example of how those fighters can work together has instead revealed just how fractured Iraqi forces are.

“I wouldn’t say the different forces in the Fallujah operation are cooperating: They’ve just divided up the battlefield,” said Patrick Martin, an Iraq analyst with the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank based in Washington.

Since IS overran Mosul in the summer of 2014, two groups have come to dominate the fight in Iraq: The country’s elite counterterrorism special forces and the government-sanctioned, largely Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization Forces.

Once highly centralized under former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s security forces have splintered under the weight of the political and security crises that were unleashed by the IS blitz across Iraq two years ago.

Iraq’s military largely disintegrated in the face of that assault, and in the days that followed, a number of largely Shiite militia groups took up arms against IS and stopped its advance north of Baghdad.

While rebuilding Iraq’s military has been a slow process with mixed results, Iraq’s Shiite militias have quickly grown in strength. More powerful than the country’s own military, the militia fighters were formally incorporated into the Iraqi government force under command of the prime minister. But most have tried to stay separate.

Meanwhile, the U.N. human rights chief said there were “credible reports” that Iraqis fleeing Fallujah were facing physical abuse as they escaped the city.

In a statement Tuesday from his Geneva office, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein cited witness accounts that armed groups backing Iraqi forces have detained some men and teenage boys leaving Fallujah with force that at times “degenerates” into abuse.