A Balancing Act as Iraq Claims Gains in Tikrit

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Shiite fighters near a suicide bomb attack Thursday on the southern edge of Tikrit, site of an offensive by Iraqi government forces. Credit Thaier Al-Sudani/Reuters

 

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared Thursday that victory in Tikrit was near and “achieved totally by Iraqi hands” as his troops sought to root out Islamic State militants from their last few footholds in the city.

Islamic State militants still held a sprawling palace complex built by Saddam Hussein and pockets of the city center. But military officials said they were confident that in a few days they would control the entire area, all without direct assistance from American airstrikes.

That would be the most significant defeat for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, since it swept into northern Iraq last June, carving a swath through the country that put the militants a short drive away from Baghdad and, within weeks, brought American forces back into Iraq after they had seemingly marched out for good in 2011.

As the next set of challenges for the Iraqi government came into focus — keeping the sectarian peace around Tikrit and pursuing the Islamic State farther north toward its self-declared capital in Mosul — Mr. Abadi, fresh from visiting troops near Tikrit, fiercely staked claim on Thursday to what he called a great, cooperative victory. In a speech in Baghdad that seemed carefully balanced to please both of Iraq’s rival allies, Iran and the United States, he rejected the notion that Iran, in its increasingly overt aid on the battlefield, was unduly encroaching on Iraq.

“Today the world is with us and helping us out because the world is feeling the danger of ISIS,” he said, in an apparent reference to Iranian, American and other foreign advisers.

“We welcome the support from the whole world and the neighboring countries, of assistants and trainers and advisers to help us in our war against terrorism,” he said. “But on the other hand, we don’t want anyone to interfere in our internal affairs or our sovereignty, which is a red line for us.”

He insisted that the Shiite militias that made up the bulk of the Tikrit offensive were not a sectarian force but a legitimate arm of the government, established during a national emergency when ISIS appeared poised to march on Baghdad and the regular army and the police collapsed. New volunteers flocked to the mobilization forces, but those forces have retained much of the structure and leadership of pre-existing Shiite militias.

The difficulty of Mr. Abadi’s political hand was highlighted on Wednesday night, when his rival and predecessor, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, accompanied him to the front lines to share some of the glory of the progress in Tikrit.

In the weeks and months ahead, analysts said, Mr. Abadi must offer the Shiite militias that played the pivotal role in the Tikrit offensive enough support to please them and Iran, while preventing his Shiite political rivals from outflanking him.

But he must also avoid alienating the United States, which has continued to provide air support and training against ISIS elsewhere. American officials would prefer to see Iraqi national forces take the military lead, but that is a tough order to fill, given that the army and police forces that the United States spent billions on training after the invasion in 2003 largely evaporated when ISIS attacked.

Even more challenging for Mr. Abadi, he must stay on the right side of the militias’ enthusiastic supporters within his Shiite political base, a community galvanized by the Islamic State’s massacres of Shiites. Yet adding to their power and legitimacy, analysts said, could keep him from establishing the strong Iraqi institutions that would give him real power as prime minister.

“He’s in a very paradoxical position,” said Maria Fantappie, the Iraq analyst at the International Crisis Group. “He has to please them to keep public opinion and the Revolutionary Guards on his side. But if these Shiite militias stay as the backbone of the Iraqi security forces, while keeping their leadership structure intact, which is the way we’re going right now, there will by no means be a powerful Abadi. There will always be other actors, like Maliki and others, interfering.”

As leading clerics and militia figures declared that the Americans were not serious about the war against ISIS, Mr. Abadi said that any suggestion that the militias, referred to here as popular mobilization forces, were sectarian or extragovernmental came from “those who hate us.”

“The popular mobilization is an Iraqi institute within the Iraqi national security system,” he said. “It expresses the unity between the Iraqi citizens and our armed forces.”

Mr. Abadi also called for security forces to facilitate the return of displaced civilians from Tikrit and surrounding areas.

Bringing civilians back without continuing conflict will be a critical measure of government control, especially given the extra emotional resonance of the fight for Tikrit. It was there that Islamic State fightersmassacred more than 1,000 Shiite soldiers from Camp Speicher last year, and many Shiites accuse some local Sunnis of taking part.

Raw emotions were on display in Baghdad on Thursday morning, where several dozen parents of the dead soldiers gathered at the busy Tahrir Square, holding photographs of their sons and calling for an international investigation into the deaths because they did not trust Iraqi officials to arrive at the truth.

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ISIS massacred hundreds of Iraqi military recruits in June 2014. Ali Hussein Kadhim survived. 

They said they were happy to see the Islamic State falling in Tikrit, but their anger and grief were not assuaged. They blamed not only the militants for the massacre but also, in apparently equal measure, what they said was the cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders and the negligence and corruption of Iraqi officials and their sons’ commanders.

“We want a legal trial to bring justice for our sons,” said one father, Mahdi Saleh, clutching a picture of his 22-year-old son Nahum. Standing beside Mr. Saleh, another man who lost a son, Ali Shadhan Shahrar, demanded that those responsible be “executed in front of the victims’ families.”

“We have no problem with the Sunnis, and we will have unity,” Mr. Saleh added. “But peace with those criminals? Never.”

As Mr. Abadi proclaimed a united front against ISIS, Iraq’s Parliament discussed allegations that United States aircraft had possibly killed Iraqi soldiers in two separate episodes. In one, a parliamentary report said, eight soldiers were killed in an American airstrike on Dec. 24.

Military officials also said they were investigating whether a warplane from the American-led coalition against ISIS bombed troops in Anbar Province on Wednesday evening. But one representative of the Defense Ministry said that the troops had been killed by an ISIS bomb.

United States military officials said that while there had been American airstrikes in the area, they were not aware that any had gone astray, and that they were looking into the reports.

The government advances in Tikrit came as Iraqi officials said they would investigate reports of atrocities, filmed and posted in recent months on social media, and committed by armed men in uniforms with the insignia of a special forces unit and other regular government forces.

The images were compiled and presented to Iraqi and United States officials by ABC News. The images raised the question of whether Iraqi forces might have run afoul of a measure that requires the United States to halt aid to foreign militaries that commit human rights abuses.

(NY Times/RT)

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