Tensions between the United States and Iraq this month arose fears that pressure on the Islamic State (ISIS) would be significantly eased, enabling it to re-organize and carry out new terror attacks in Iraq and beyond.
“I think the environment is so unstable, so dangerous, we all need to be worried and concerned, and certainly in the case of Iraq – and I go back to Iraq as well – Iraq is very fragile, very precarious,” warned Iraqi President Barham Salih on Sunday.
“The stability that we have acquired after years of conflict against ISIS was not easy,” he added. “It could easily unravel.”
The first month of 2020 saw unprecedented escalation between the United States and Iran in Iraq.
In just over a week, between Dec. 27 to Jan. 3 inclusive, tensions between the two powers dramatically escalated. On Dec. 27, a rocket attack by the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah Iraqi Shiite militia against the K1 base in Kirkuk killed an American civilian contractor and wounded US troops.
Kataib Hezbollah launched several such rocket attacks at bases housing US soldiers in recent months, but this was the first incident to result in a fatality. The US had repeatedly warned that such provocations wouldn’t go unanswered.
The US retaliation was prompt. On Dec. 29, it bombed five sites related to Kataib Hezbollah, killing at least 25 of the group’s fighters and wounding 55 more. The group was incensed. On Dec. 31, angry militants violently protested outside the US embassy compound in Baghdad and demanded the expulsion of US troops from the country.
Then, in the early hours of Jan. 3, Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) extraterritorial Quds Force, was killed when a US drone targeted his convoy as it was leaving Baghdad International Airport. He was travelling with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the leader of Kataib Hezbollah, who was also killed in the strike.
Iran directly retaliated on Jan. 8, firing about a dozen missiles at two bases housing US troops, one in Ain Al-Asad airbase in Iraq’s Anbar province and the other in Erbil International Airport in Iraqi Kurdistan. While no US troops were killed, 34 suffered brain injuries in the Al-Asad missile strike.
Despite continued tensions, the situation has not deteriorated any further since then, and fears of dangerous escalation or all-out war between the United States and Iran have markedly decreased.
These tensions with Iran resulted in the US pausing its campaign against ISIS for about a fortnight. Anti-ISIS operations have since resumed, and the US military insists that the group was not able to exploit US-Iran tensions in Iraq.
The US troop presence in Iraq is authorized by Baghdad primarily to help it combat the Islamic State (ISIS), through training its security forces and supporting them in anti-ISIS operations. The US has approximately 5,000 troops in the country. There have been increased calls in Baghdad, particularly by factions backed by Iran, for them to be evicted in response to Soleimani’s assassination.
In the recent months, the Iraqi Kurds have been warning anyone that will listen about the threat that ISIS remnants still pose to the broader region and how the group could make a significant resurgence if not continuously combated.
Lahur Talabani, head of Iraqi Kurdistan’s Zanyari intelligence agency, also warned that ISIS has weathered the destruction of its self-styled caliphate and remains a serious threat as a non-state actor.
“They have better techniques, better tactics and a lot more money at their disposal,” Talabani said. “They are able to buy vehicles, weapons, food supplies and equipment. Technologically they’re more savvy. It’s more difficult to flush them out. So, they are like al-Qaeda on steroids.”
On Oct. 16, 2017, in an operation overseen by none other than Qasem Soleimani, Iraqi forces, many of them Iran-backed Shiite paramilitaries, seized territorially-disputed Kirkuk from the Kurdish Peshmerga. Throughout the following fortnight, these paramilitaries and the Peshmerga clashed along Iraqi Kurdistan’s frontiers with Iraq. On Oct. 20, the Peshmerga successfully destroyed an American-made Iraqi M1 Abrams main battle tank that the Shiite militias were using. Both sides agreed to a ceasefire by the end of the month, averting the dire prospect of all-out war.
The ensuing distrust between both sides resulted in security gaps emerging between both their front-line positions. ISIS shrewdly exploited these gaps and, despite several successive Iraqi operations to rout them, retains a presence in these areas, including in caves in the Hamrin Mountains. The group has assassinated several villager leaders, known as ‘moqtars’, in a clear bid to undermine local confidence in the ability of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) to protect them and combat the militants.
For now, ISIS cannot carry out attacks in formations larger than 15 fighters, but that could soon change if pressure on them is relieved.
In recent months, other tensions in Iraq demonstrated how the ISIS fight could be fatally undermined. Last July and August, four airstrikes believed to have been carried out by Israel hit Shiite militia bases across Iraq. Baghdad briefly closed its airspace and imposed restrictions on US-led coalition operations in the country. Under those restrictions, the US had to consult with Baghdad before operating its aircraft in Iraqi airspace.
The US State Department pointed out that this “hurt” the US-led campaign against ISIS since it reduced “the ability of the coalition to use ISR [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance] assets to observe and monitor ISIS activity.”
ISIS would undoubtedly be empowered if the US is expelled from Iraq and is banned from using Iraqi airspace for ISR overflights and airstrikes.
The Iraqi military and Iran-backed Shiite militias in the country have demonstrated a limited capability to combat ISIS on their own adequately.
For example, in 2015, the late Muhandis sought to demonstrate that the Iran-backed Shiite militias were capable of combating ISIS independently. They offered Baghdad the option to participate in their operation, provided it did so without US support.
However, the paramilitaries became bogged down and were unable to rout ISIS. Baghdad then had to rely on US air support and regular Iraqi troops, which liberated Tikrit, denying the militias the ability to demonstrate that only they and their Iranian backers were needed to liberate Iraq from ISIS.
In 2016, the Shiite militias also failed to remove ISIS from the tiny Turkmen Shiite village of Bashir in Kirkuk province despite several months of trying. Instead, US airpower enabled the Peshmerga to capture it in a couple of days.
Iraqi Shiite militias stoked sectarian tensions by carrying out reprisals against Sunni Iraqi civilians when they liberated areas from ISIS, notably Fallujah. As a result, they were prevented from participating in the liberation of Mosul, the largest city ISIS ever captured.
US-trained elite Golden Division Iraqi soldiers bore the brunt of the fighting to liberate Iraqi towns and cities from ISIS with US air support. This formula was used in Ramadi in late 2015 and then in Mosul in 2016-17. While highly destructive, this strategy ultimately destroyed the Iraqi wing of ISIS’ caliphate by the end of 2017.
Today, the ISF still needs substantive training and support for counter-insurgency operations against ISIS. If Iraq opts to remove the US and other coalition members, ISIS will inevitably find itself under far less pressure and could pose a much more serious threat to Iraq and beyond in the not-too-distant future.
Iraq’s caretaker Prime Minister Adil Abdul Mahdi, who has said its time for American troops to leave, pointed out that there were no US troops based in Iraq between 2011 and 2014 and relations between Baghdad and Washington were not fundamentally affected. However, he failed to remind us that this was also the very same period when ISIS was able to organize itself and infamously conquer one-third of the country in the summer of 2014.
Image credit: Alisdare Hickson