Why Iraqis are fighting in Syria
Shiite militiamen see the civil war next door as another front in their own battle with Islamic State.
BAGHDAD — The light was low and the music loud in the Sun of the Countryside nightclub. Suddenly, the DJ turned down the drumbeat to a whisper as the lounge singer brought the mic close to his lips. Around him a trio of pouty women in elaborate hairdos and brightly colored gowns undulated.
“Let Syria remain under Bashar Assad,” he intoned, repeating the phrase like a mantra. The dancers nodded their heads to the rhythm of his words.
As civil war rages in neighboring Syria, many Iraqis consider the outcome vitally important to their own country. They see the fight as another front in the battle they face at home. Some factions of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units — paramilitary groups embroiled in their own war against Islamic State — have flown supplies and thousands of men across the border to help battle the rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“For us, the primary battle is in Syria. If it is not dealt with, then we will pay the price here,” said Aws Khafaji, head of the Iraqi subsidiary of the Abu Fadl Abbas Brigade, a Shiite faction that emerged in Syria in 2012 and whose membership is dominated by Iraqis.
“We already paid the price once and we lost three provinces to Islamic State,” Khafaji said, referring to the extremist group’s audacious blitz campaign in June 2014, when the jihadis crossed the Syrian border, overran wide swaths of Iraq’s northern and western provinces and announced their caliphate from the northern city of Mosul.
The fight in Syria, however, goes beyond a preemptive strike on an imminent threat. It has become the main battlefield between Islam’s two major denominations, pitting the Shiite-majority militiamen of the Popular Mobilization Units, who fight alongside pro-Assad troops, against the Sunni-dominated insurgency.
Iraqi groups like Abu Fadl Abbas and the League of the Righteous first appeared in Syria in 2012 defending a Shiite shrine near Damascus that has been a frequent target of rebel and Islamic State attacks.
Although they raced back to Iraq to fight Islamic State in 2014, a string of successes against the extremist groups, and a surge in recruiting ahead of Russia’s foray into the Syrian crisis in September 2015, allowed them to redeploy in Syria in even greater numbers.
Their arrival was welcomed. Years of civil war had thinned out Damascus’ manpower, and the fresh fighters became an essential component of military operations across the country.
The militiamen, sporting their characteristic yellow and green patches, often take on the role of shock troops, ferreting out the rebels in punishing street fighting.
In Maaloula, a Christian enclave about 30 miles northeast of Damascus that was retaken by the government in 2014, Abu Fadl Abbas fighters led the assault on the last rebel redoubts in the town, while army and national defense personnel watched from a nearby hill.
And for Aleppo, the epicenter of grinding street battles between the government and the opposition, an Iraqi faction, Harakat Nujaba, announced in August that it had dispatched 2,000 fighters, boosting the force in the Syrian city beyond 7,000 men. The faction, supported by Assad’s top regional ally, Iran, has served for two years as a special force for Damascus, wresting control of areas and then handing them back to the Syrian army.
Their arrival in Syria was tacitly approved but not officially sanctioned by Baghdad. They join fighters delivered by an Iranian air bridge that sends Shiites from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to reinforce Assad’s forces.
The changes, according to Ammar Saqqar, military spokesman for the U.S.backed rebel group Fastaqim Kama Umert, are reflected on the battlefield.
“For nearly a year, we’ve seen the fights being led mostly by Shiite groups like Hezbollah and others,” Saqqar said. Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite faction, is a vital ally of the Syrian government.
“All the dead and wounded and captured in our battle in [the south Aleppo neighborhood of] Sheik Said, all of them are Iraqi fighters.”
Harakat Nujaba fighters have deployed in Aleppo because it is “a city as strategic to the battle against extremism as Mosul,” and not because of religious beliefs, said its spokesman Hisham Moussawi. His group, he insisted, was fighting “to remove the specter of terrorism from Christian and Shiite cities, because we care only about humanity.”
“We believe the enemy is one and the project is one. It’s a natural extension of the battle in Iraq, Yemen and Libya,” he said, accusing the rebels of being the ideological brethren of Islamic State’s extremists.
“Whoever cuts the head off someone and who desecrates churches, shrines, mosques ... who destroys factories, they claim to be moderate,” he said. He referred to incidents where opposition fighters, including groups deemed mainstream rebels, were accused of engaging in beheadings and destruction of religious structures. “What is this moderate opposition that accepts American planes to hit Syria?”
Khafaji of Abu Fadl Abbas echoed that view, adding that there had been discussions from the Popular Mobilization Units leadership to deploy in Syria once the battle for Mosul was over.
“After Fallujah … there was an internal decision that after Mosul we must protect our western borders with Syria and participate in an agreement with the Syrian government to fight there,” he said.
Popular Mobilization Units spokesman Ahmad Assadi, however, said such a decision would have to come from Baghdad. “If ... the Iraqi government decides to chase the terrorist groups to Syria to guarantee they do not threaten the borders again, then we will be ready.”
But in Syria, the rebels see the Iraqi factions as little more than sectarian mercenaries.
This month, Fastaqim rebels posted images and videos depicting their interrogation of a Harakat Nujaba militiaman.
“This land is forbidden to you. This is the land of Omar and Abu Bakr,” said one rebel fighter, invoking the names of revered Sunni figures, as the militiaman broke down in tears and insisted he was a Sunni.
“Why did you do this to us?” he said to the camera, after being told to give a message to his commanders.
The fate of those captured had not been determined.