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Iraq-Syria-Islamic State future

Can IS survive to 2023?

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Can IS survive to 2023?

The Islamic State terror group may continue to thrive for the time being, but over the longer term it is doomed to fail, writes Salah Nasrawi

When the Islamic State (IS) group declared itself to be a caliphate, with its leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, setting himself up as a ruler “by order of God” following the group’s advances last summer, sympathisers quickly cheered the pronouncement as a heaven-sent victory.

The group’s spokesman Abu Mohamed Al-Adnani even boasted that “the legality of all emirates, groups, states and organisations has become null and void by the expansion of the caliphate’s authority and the arrival of its troops in their areas.”

In order to further establish the status of its jihadist state, IS removed the boundaries between two Arab countries and began issuing passports to its “citizens”.

A growing number of zealots from around the world, including Americans and Europeans, have flocked to the Islamic State’s territories, which once run from northern Syria to the Iraqi province of Diyalah on the borders with Iran.

But as followers and sympathisers celebrated, detractors dismissed the declaration of the Muslim “holy state” as nothing more than propaganda. The phenomenon, they argued, was just “a response to the chaos” that has spread in Iraq and Syria. Time, they said, would prove that establishing a worldwide Muslim movement and mobilising a broad coalition of supporters is simply over-hyped optimism.

Yet, regardless of whether the global Islamic caliphate will be accepted in the international and regional arenas or not, the question remains of whether the IS-led insurgency in Iraq and Syria that has become a synonym for fear and bloodshed is sustainable.

It is true that the dramatic fall of the city of Ramadi to IS last month gave control of virtually all of Anbar province to the militants, pushing them to the edge of Baghdad. IS has also made significant gains in Syria, including the capture of the key city of Palmyra and some other towns in Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

But the new onslaughts may also have exposed how the IS insurgency in Iraq and Syria has neared its limits.

In order to maintain its gains, IS needs to pursue two sets of goals. First, it needs to win over the Sunni population in the areas under its control by striking a delicate balance between its radical religious programme and their traditional Arab nationalism.

Second, it has to subdue the Shia in Iraq and the Alawites and other non-Muslim minorities in Syria by either forcing them to convert to its extremist ideology or to flee and leave their areas to its control.

Neither of these two goals will be easy to achieve.

Though IS has relied heavily on local Sunnis, including former Baathists in Iraq and Arab tribes who felt marginalised after years of Alawite rule in Syria, there is an ongoing debate about whether this is a tactical alliance or a more strategic one.

Unlike the Taliban and the Hizbi Islami of Gulbaddin Hekmetyar in Afghanistan that created national mujahideen organisations with broad-based Pashtun appeal, IS has showed no inclination to transform itself into a nationalist Sunni Arab insurgency.

A similar transformation also occurred in Kashmir where the nationalist insurgency for independence from India turned Islamist under the influence of rising jihadist movements in Pakistan.

Baathists in Iraq and pan-Arab nationalists in Syria have also collaborated with IS in the war against Baghdad and Damascus, but in order to achieve its long-term objectives IS will need to invent a new approach and build new relationships that can fuse its religious ideology with the more secular Arab nationalism among Iraqi and Syrian Sunnis.

On a broader level, IS has ruled vast Sunni areas since June last year, and there has not been much for the local population to admire. The jihadi group is harsh, narrow-minded and intolerant of dissent. Its fighters act like barbaric psychopaths willing to engage in the most brutal forms of violence in order to slaughter their way into controlling Sunni areas.

Millions of people in Sunni towns captured by IS in Iraq and Syria have left their homes. Many prefer to live in miserable conditions in camps in neighbouring countries, or brave the Mediterranean Sea to seek refuge in Europe and refuse to return. Others are taking up arms to fight IS in the name of Iraqi and Syrian nationalism.

IS’s expansion in many other Arab countries, including Egypt, Libya and Saudi Arabia, and its endeavour to win supporters in other places has begun to pose a serious threat to regional security and stability.

As for the other goal of subduing Shia and Alawites to its ideology and rule, that seems far-fetched. The Shia, who consider IS an existential threat, do not seem interested in a compromise with the group’s militants. This takfiri group, which considers Shia and Alawites to be infidels and is bent on their annihilation, remains their biggest challenge.

The Iraqi state they control enjoys legitimacy and support among a large number of the world’s nations. The Iraqi Shia have been quick to mobilise hundreds of thousands of men and militias on the front line, and they have overwhelming firepower and motivation in the fight against IS.

A substantial number of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units and Iraqi Shia militiamen are already fighting on the side of the Al-Assad regime in Syria.

IS may be able to survive setbacks and will probably be able to engineer new advances, but its ability to sustain a self-styled caliphate or even victory in the war remains very much in doubt.

In recent weeks, the group has been seen to be losing ground in many parts of Iraq and Syria, and the tide is beginning to turn against IS. According to many military estimates, it faces a grim future and its defeat is militarily certain but probably not until it plunges the Middle East into further chaos.

One of the main consequences of the raising of the black banners of IS over an area from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea is that the group has been able to change the geopolitical dynamics of the Middle East. While its scourges have deepened the sectarian schism in the region to a point of no return, the territorial dimensions of its onslaughts have showed that it can result in changing the region’s political map.

In many ways, the success of IS in breaking up Iraq and Syria will create a new regional order in which ethno-and sectarian-based new countries will emerge. The emerging nations of Arabs, Kurds, Shia, Sunni and Alawites, among other ethnicities, will be pitted against each other while trying to consolidate their new national identities and boundaries.

Many believe that IS’s stunning rise over the last few months has been a catalyst for what has been widely expected since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. The tragic domino effect that followed left the Middle East in turmoil amidst the threat of yet another regional conflagration along sectarian lines.

According to this theory, IS, which was empowered by the same US-led invasion, is part of an ill-conceived patchwork geo-strategy to re-draw the map of the Middle East, which was defined by the European powers and established in several international agreements following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I.

A different map, professed by US journalist Robin Wright in a famous article in The New York Times on 28 September 2013,  “would be a strategic game-changer for just about everybody, potentially reconfiguring alliances, security challenges, and trade and energy flows for much of the world, too.”

For many Middle East watchers that moment is fast approaching. In their view, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 which established the century-old national boundaries of modern Turkey and remnants of the former Ottoman Empire, such as Iraq and Syria, will expire, or perhaps be up for review, on its hundredth anniversary in 2023.

Whether the new mapping will happen in keeping with secret articles in the treaty, as advocates believe, or whether it will be the consequences of the tectonic shift triggered by the Iraq invasion, the Middle East could wake up one day in the next few years with different border lines for many of its countries.

Until now, Iraq and Syria have resisted falling apart. In both countries IS is receiving significant setbacks, and its fighters are losing ground. The results of this week’s elections in Turkey, which saw a sharp decline in votes for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), will also have an impact on Turkey’s regional policies that have helped in IS’s rise.

At its worst, IS may prove that it was only an instrument used by outsiders who have long “gamed the Middle East,” and at its best it may be the force that destroys in order to create the future.

Whatever the results of these conflicts of historical magnitude may be, IS, with its brutality and murderous ideology, seems to have no place in the new Middle East.

This article appeared first in The Al- Ahram Weekly on June 11, 2015

Iraq-Future

Who will fight for Iraq’s survival?

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Who will fight for Iraq’s survival?

World powers will meet in Paris next week to consider prospects for ending the war in Iraq, writes Salah Nasrawi

The Iraqis are aware that next week’s Paris conference will not produce the results needed to end the bloody conflict in their country. Nonetheless, the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi has decided to attend the meeting, clinging to the hope that something good may come out of the high-level discussions.

‌Sceptics fear that the international conference will be another public-relations ploy by the United States and other Western nations to conceal their failure in helping Iraqis rebuild their country more than 12 years after the US-led invasion.

‌Worse, the conference comes amid increasing signs that US President Barack Obama, who ends his term in office in 18 months, is buying time through the talks to adjust his anti-Islamic State (IS) strategy, while planning to dump the Iraqi conflict on the next US president.

‌French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said some of the 60 countries that are part of the US-led coalition fighting against the IS terror group are expected to participate in the conference to take place in Paris on 2 June.

‌A few days after the stunning seizure of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, by IS militants last June, Washington said it was launching a military alliance to help the Iraqis drive the militants from the city and from other terrain captured by IS.

‌Washington said it would work with its partners to contain the IS militants and reverse their gains in Iraq and Syria. In Obama’s words, their strategy was to “degrade and ultimately defeat” the group.

‌Washington’s approach to the campaign has come under fire for being ineffective. The critics’ main complaint is that the Obama administration has no clear vision, suggesting that better strategic planning is needed to defeat IS.

‌Meanwhile, instead of being degraded the group has expanded in both Iraq and Syria. Its capture of the strategic Iraqi city of Ramadi and the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria in recent days has marked the latest in a series of setbacks for the US strategy.

‌Fabius said participants at the Paris meeting will “take stock of how the coalition wants to proceed” in Iraq, but he did not give details. He said that it was “not impossible” that Syria would also be part of the talks.

‌The last such talks were held in Paris in September and saw representatives from around 30 countries and international organisations meet in an attempt to come up with a strategy to combat IS and to determine what the roles of each would be in the US-led coalition.

‌Next week’s gathering comes amid mounting fears that IS militants will use their control of Ramadi and Palmyra to consolidate their gains in both Iraq and Syria and threaten the rest of the region.

‌For many critics, the fall of Ramadi amounts to a strategic defeat for the US-led coalition. It has raised a series of broader questions, not only about the viability of Washington’s approach in Iraq but also about its policies in the Middle East as a whole.

‌The key question now is whether the fall of Ramadi can serve as a wake-up call and if the world powers can handle the Iraqi crisis in a way different from the dozens of regional and international meetings on Iraq that have taken place since the US-led invasion in 2003.

‌It is unclear if the participants at the Paris summit will forge a new path against IS, apart from what is widely seen as the coalition’s ineffective bombing campaign to hit the militants in Iraq and Syria.

‌Washington has conceded that it is taking a “hard look” at its Iraq strategy after the fall of Ramadi, and it has said it will be streamlining the process for delivering weapons to Iraq and increasing the training of Iraqi troops.

‌But despite renewed calls from Republican rivals, such as Arizona Senator John McCain, to deploy US troops to help the Iraqis fight the terrorist group, the Obama administration is not expected to send combat soldiers to Iraq.

‌What Washington and other partners in the coalition are expected to offer in Paris is a renewal of their support for Al-Abadi’s government while restating their policy, which urges a more inclusive government in Iraq and the participation of the Sunnis in policing their areas.

‌What Washington needs to realise is that too much time has passed since it substituted action in Iraq with rhetoric. A close look at events in Iraq since the US troops were withdrawn in 2011 shows it now has fairly limited power in dictating what happens in Iraq.

‌Today, in an Iraq that is not conspicuously stage-managed by the United States, domestic and regional actors, including Iran and the Tehran-backed Shia militias, play pivotal roles. It is even difficult to imagine the magnitude of the forces working against, or at least not in line with, the United States policy in Iraq.

‌This probably puts into perspective remarks made by a senior administration official to Reuters on 18 May to the effect that the United States could support “all elements” of forces aligned against IS, including the Shia militias that are nominally under the Baghdad government’s control.

‌Washington had previously backed off from giving air support to what it considered Iranian-organised and -led operations dominated by Shia militias that answer to Tehran, and so this statement marks a departure from earlier policy.

‌It also underlines Washington’s decision to scrap earlier plans to supply Sunni tribes with weapons directly, without going through Baghdad. The United States has held back the delivery of much-needed weapons to the Iraqi army as an expression of displeasure at Al-Abadi’s hesitation to equip the Sunni tribes.

‌The most impressive sign of a retreat from taking responsibility for the setback in the war against the IS militants is accusations made by US Defence Secretary Ash Carter to the Iraqi armed forces, saying that they show “no will to fight” against the terror group.

‌Moreover, the United States has made little objection to Iranian forces taking an offensive role in operations to drive out IS militants from Beiji in recent days, in conjunction with Iraqi Shia militia.

‌The report of Iran entering the fight to retake this major Iraqi oil refinery, which came from US officials, was the first sign that Washington may have even dropped its opposition to Iranian participation in the war against IS.

‌What all this says about the shape of things to come after the so-called adjustment of US strategy after the spectacular fall of Ramadi is that Obama has no real intention of shifting course and seems determined to leave the war in Iraq to his successor.

‌In a recent briefing by a senior State Department official, the administration sent the clearest message yet to the Iraqis that no drastic change is to be expected in the anti-IS strategy before the end of Obama’s term in January 2017.

‌“I think some of the timeframes that might’ve been announced by various folks over the course of this thing might’ve been a little bit unrealistic. It’s three years: a three-year campaign, three years to degrade,” the official was quoted as saying at the special briefing posted on the State Department’s website.

‌This leaves the question why the Paris summit is being held, and whether or not this will be another pointless endeavour. Though the agenda of the meeting has not been made public, it is widely expected to be an attempt to breathe life into the dormant coalition.

‌Most of the coalition’s 60 members have not done much to fight IS, despite repeated US urging for them to play a more active role. Some of the countries that deployed aircraft at the beginning of the campaign have also since pulled back.

‌Nevertheless, the Obama administration seems to be keen on keeping the outfit working, ostensibly to portray coalition partners as reliable supporters in the crisis.

‌In the meantime, no one knows how the Iraq government will benefit from the high-level conference in Paris. Three previous coalition meetings have ended with many political statements but few tangible commitments.

‌The stunning fall of Ramadi and the Obama administration’s hesitation to come to the aid of the Iraqi forces should have taught the Iraqi government the lesson that it must now work according to its own schedule.

‌If the Iraqis won’t fight for their nation’s survival, no one else will either.

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Chaos in Anbar

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Chaos in Anbar

The war against Islamic State may be about to take a sharp turn as Baghdad commits Shia militias on the Anbar front, writes Salah Nasrawi

Hours after Islamic State (IS) insurgents seized the Anbar provincial government headquarters in the city of Ramadi and raised the group’s black flag over the compound, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi vowed the country’s security forces and Shia armed factions would drive the militants back “within the next few hours”.

“Like in any war, there might be a retreat here or there, but we are determined to beat Daesh [IS],” Al-Abadi said in a nationwide televised address using the Arabic acronym of the group. “It will suffer a bitter defeat,” he declared.

Taken at face value, Al-Abadi’s pledge to beat the terror group and retake Ramadi sounds like hollow rhetoric. The extent of the retreat of the Iraqi security forces at the hands of IS militants in Ramadi and the opposition to deploying the Shia Popular Mobilisation Force has called into question a fast victory over the brutal insurgents.

But things change in wars, though they remain largely unpredictable. Whether Al-Abadi can fulfil his steadfast commitment will depend on the “shadow of uncertainty”, or what one of the greatest war strategists, Clausewitz, calls the “interactive nature” of war.

In other words, Al-Abadi will need to have a scheme that will not only underlie the conduct of the war with IS, but will also deal with the Iraqi conflict as a whole.

Iraq’s latest round of chaos began early on 15 May when IS fighters made a foray into Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar, Iraq’s largest province and the heartland of the Sunni insurgency since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Of course, like the widespread mystery surrounding IS militants since their stunning advances in northern and western Iraq last year, there have been many theories about what happened on that fateful day in Ramadi.

Whether the brutal jihadists made a daring push using armoured bulldozers, explosive-rigged cars and suicide bombings to burst through the defences, or whether it was the result of the security forces’ failure to put up a strong resistance, the assailants had taken over the city centre by the afternoon and hoisted IS’s black flag over the provincial government headquarters.

Exactly what happened remains a mystery. There has been no mention of the proximate reasons behind the fall of the city centre to the jihadists who were known to be preparing to attack Ramadi. Much less is known about the circumstances that led the security forces to withdraw from their posts.

Worse still, the entire strategic city fell to IS jihadists two days after government forces abandoned their positions following a massive blitz by suicide car-bomb attacks. The collapse of the police and the security forces recalled the retreat of the Iraqi military forces last summer when IS captured about a third of the country’s territory.

This week’s fiasco ranks among the most humiliating defeats for Al-Abadi, who vowed after retaking Tikrit from IS last month that recapturing Anbar would be Iraq’s next move. Instead, the fall of Ramadi has allowed IS fighters to close in on the capital Baghdad.

IS’s overall operations in Anbar show an offensive strategy intended to wear down the government security forces to the point of collapse through continuous losses of personnel and material. Part of this approach is to create chaos in Baghdad by sending in more suicide bombers and using a fifth column to undermine the city’s security.

Hours before the onslaught in Ramadi, a series of bombings in Baghdad killed and injured dozens of people, mostly Shia on pilgrimage to the shrine of Imam Kadhum north of the city. A mysterious disturbance occurred on 13 May when some pilgrims set fire to a building of the Sunni Endowment after hearing rumours that terrorists wearing explosive belts were attempting to attack them.

By creating a precarious security situation in the capital, IS militants hope to pin down the security forces and the Shia militias in Baghdad and gain more footholds around the capital.

Meanwhile, Ramadi’s fall appears to be a significant blow to the US-backed military coalition to defeat IS. US President Barack Obama has pledged that the aim of the campaign is to “degrade, and ultimately destroy” IS through “a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy”.

Indeed, the clumsy strategy, which has excluded the deployment of US ground forces in the combat against IS, has made the United States a minor player in Iraq. Even as IS jihadists were making important gains in Ramadi, US officials were giving assurances that the war against the terror group was going well.

When the militants seized Ramadi in the deadly three-day blitz, Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said the IS militants had only “gained the advantage” in fighting in the city, stopping short of confirming reports that the group had seized full control of the Anbar provincial capital.

But while the Pentagon was playing down the onslaught on Ramadi and the humiliating new collapse of the Iraqi security forces, American soldiers were embarking on a Hollywood-style operation just across the border in neighbouring Syria.

As IS fighters stormed through Ramadi on 15 May, US special forces sneaked from their bases in Iraq into Syria and killed 12 IS operatives in a raid on their hideout. The White House later declared that among those killed was Abu Sayyaf, described as an instrumental figure in black-market oil smuggling.

The raid was quickly criticised as an attempt to shift the focus from supporting the Iraqi forces in the fight against IS to a PR stunt aimed at drumming up American bravery. If US forces can muster enough intelligence, combat skills and resources to go after one IS operative, Iraqis asked, why shouldn’t they come to aid their soldiers in Ramadi.

Clearly, the stunning fall of Ramadi has shown that the war against IS is in total disarray largely because Baghdad and Washington, having united in a war to stop the expansion of IS, are now utterly at odds as to how to proceed.

America’s proclamation of bringing the war to a triumphant conclusion has been buffeted by doubts by Iraqis about Washington’s commitment and fears about the motives of its policy.

While Washington remains satisfied with its airstrikes on IS targets and sees nothing further, Iraqis believe that the political limitations set by the White House on the US military have not stopped the militants from taking new ground.

The Iraqi government has been relentlessly calling on US forces to work out a joint strategy that could combine their airpower, weaponry and intelligence resources with Iraqi ground combat capability to retake territories lost to IS.

The Iraqis’ frustration was best illustrated by recent remarks by Martin E Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that while he didn’t want to see Ramadi fall, its loss wouldn’t reflect the larger picture in the fight against IS.

Earlier, Baghdad and Washington differed publicly on the timetable, tactics and who should take part in the battle to liberate the strategic northern city of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

Worse, their main difference remains the role of the Iran-backed Shia militias in the war against IS. While Washington has been preventing Baghdad from resorting to the militias for fear of a backlash from the Sunni population, Baghdad has been relying heavily on fighters from the Shia factions to dislodge IS from its positions.

The fall of Ramadi, however, seems to have left Al-Abadi with no other choice but to resist the American pressure and ask the Shia militias to deploy in Anbar and to be prepared for a counter-offensive to take back Ramadi and the rest of the province.

While acting on a desperate request by the Anbar Provincial Council and tribal leaders to send Shia militias to help fight IS and win back its cities, Al-Abadi seems also to have acted on Clausewitz’s advice that a commander cannot remain for very long in such a state without incurring “the perils of hesitation”.

By sending the Popular Mobilisation Force to Anbar, Al-Abadi has been able to demonstrate a willingness to resist the US script which would have mortgaged the liberation of areas taken by IS to an ambiguous strategy that would not only have prolonged the dangerous standoff but would ultimately have threatened Iraq’s unity.

A lot of the success of Al-Abadi now depends on how the Popular Mobilisation Force will behave in Anbar, not only in driving the IS militants back, but also in winning the trust of the Sunni population.

With its vast territories and a powerful IS force in situ, Anbar is certainly a great military challenge, but it could be a political opportunity too.

Iraq-Future

The looming Iraq disaster

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The looming Iraq disaster

As Iraq remains bogged down with the war against IS, another catastrophe could be on the horizon, writes Salah Nasrawi

The Iraqi government is considering a set of measures to deal with the crushing financial crisis, which many fear could lead to economic collapse and accelerate the breakup of the divided and war-torn country.

Under the plans to stave off default, the government of Haider Al-Abadi will seek foreign loans, issue bonds and sell parts of Iraq’s huge oil reserves. It also plans to overhaul the economy and get rid of the socialist-era sectors inherited from Saddam Hussein’s era.

But doubts abound that an emergency fund based on international credits or a government bond-selling programme would ease the burden on the Iraqi economy, hard hit by lower oil prices, government inefficiency and rampant corruption.

Selling the country’s national resources could also trigger popular resentment against the government’s oil policies and gives credence to claims that Iraq’s invasion in 2003 was to improve Western access to Iraqi oil.

Falling oil prices since last year has wrecked Iraq’s state finances. Iraq’s 2015 annual budget has projected a deficit of some $25 billion and forced the government to struggle to balance and fund its public spending and stabilize the national currency.

Under the budget law the government is to meet part of the deficit by introducing new taxes, levies and duties. Obligatory saving accounts are also to be opened for senior government officials to deposit part of their salaries. The government also decided to turn to the Central Bank reserves.

Iraq’s government, however, has not disclosed full details about its plans to deal with the financial crisis. Prime Minister Al-Abadi has even been insisting that Iraq is not facing a default but only financial difficulties due to plummeting oil prices.

While Al-Abadi appears to be either in a state of denial or lacking direct experience in financial affairs, his finance minister, Hoshyar Zebari, seems to be the one who is making most of the talking about Iraq’s plans to manage the financial crisis.

Last month Zebari disclosed that Iraq is in discussions with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and is seeking millions of dollars both in an emergency loan programme and by using Iraq’s Special Drawing Rights at the IMF.

Zebari later said Iraqi is seeking an aid package from the IMF that could total as much as $700 million in emergency assistance, a relatively small amount that indicates the sharp deterioration in Iraq’s financial conditions.

According to Zebari, the Iraqi government has also agreed for the first time to issue $5 billion in international bonds as part of a package to restore fiscal suitability and address its budget deficit. He disclosed that Iraq is negotiating with Citibank and Deutsche Bank.

In addition to the international credits and bond issue and a local-currency bond issue, Iraq is planning other measures, including a drastic shift in its policies.

Zebari said Iraq is planning to change the way it operates exploration and production contracts with oil companies. The switch will move Iraq for the first time to production- sharing contracts, where revenues are divided in a percentage split, from service contracts where oil companies are paid a set fee.

Moreover, one of the steps under consideration is to get rid of hundreds of state-owned enterprises, which employ some half a million workers. In one dramatic statement last month, Zebari described these companies as an “absolute failure.”

In its efforts to lower the deficit and cut spending, Iraq’s parliament approved in January a belt-tightening budget that reduced the lavish spending, such as generous allowances, travel and office expenses.

It also resorted to withdrawals from the country’s reserves, estimated at the time at $75 billion. Reports this week suggested that the national reserve has hit a new low at $60 billion.

But the worst part of the financial crisis is its overall impact on the war against the Islamic State (IS) terror group which has occupied vast swathes of territories in Iraq since June last year.

The campaign against IS has been slammed by cuts in spending, including the government’s inability to buy necessary supplies and pay salaries to tens of thousands of recruits in the Popular Mobilization Force, the Shia paramilitary force set to join the fight.

In March, Al-Abadi made a visit to the White House to make an urgent request of billions of dollars in financial and military aid from President Barack Obama for the ongoing campaign against IS. Abadi argued that the budget shortfall has hampered his government’s ability to mount military challenges to IS strongholds in northern and western Iraq.

Still, Al-Abadi returned empty handed after the Obama administration turned down the request. To make a bad situation worse, the US House Armed Services Committee passed a law last week which imposed preconditions on funding for the Iraqi security forces over the next year.

Shortages of funding is also blocking the government from restoring basic services to those towns that have been reclaimed by Iraqi force from IS. Iraq is now turning to the World Bank for help in financing development projects in these areas that suffer from a lack of infrastructure, education and health services.

Many economists and many Iraqis blame much of the financial crisis on Al-Abadi’s government and that of his predecessor, Nuri Al-Maliki, whom they accuse of mismanagement and widespread corruption.

Even with increasing fear of financial crash, Iraq’s Central Bank is still holding daily auctions through which hard currency is sold to banks, companies and traders in exchange for evidence of import and transaction receipts.

Last week, Abdel Basit Turki, Iraq’s ex-chief auditor and former Central Bank governor, told Al-Baghdadiya Television that most of these banks are phonies set up by corrupt politicians to target the foreign currency sales.

He said during his tenure as Central Bank head from 2011 to 2015 some $12 billion were skimmed from the Iraqi reserve and transferred outside Iraq using false documents.

Writing on his Facebook account, Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the parliamentary Finance Committee, disclosed that one Iraqi trader alone had made such transactions of $1.2 billion to a company in the United Arab Emirates over a one-year period.

Now Zebari’s disclosures are sounding the alarm that the country may be facing a slow-death scenario. The question remains, however, if the intended measures could prevent Iraq going bankrupt and stop the violence-ravaged country from sliding into further instability.

It is also not clear if these plans were reviewed and sanctioned by the government and whether they will be put for debate and endorsement by the parliament.

Some of the measures such as selling Iraq’s oil reserves and introducing production-sharing contracts, seem to be controversial. Many Iraqis believe that they will be conceding sovereign wealth to foreign companies.

There are growing concerns that compliance with the IMF conditions unveiled by Zebari, further cuts in spending and foreign borrowing will result in worse scenarios. Iraqis are already hard hit by high prices, rising inflation and a high rate of currency depreciation.

In the meantime, Iraq’s oil production policy seems in disarray. While Iraq’s oil exports rose in April to a record 3.08 million barrels per day (bpd) from 2.98 million bpd in March, the country is not expected to raise much higher revenues as crude prices remain low.

At the same time, Iraq’s bill for paying foreign companies operating in Iraq under service contracts regime, created by the US occupation authority following the 2003 invasion, based on a fixed dollar fee per unit, has ballooned just as its oil revenues fall.

The Iraqi financial crisis is widely seen as largely the result of the massive corruption and economic mismanagement of its political elite and not the plunge in oil prices.

While Iraq remains mired in sectarian strife, an economic crash will be detrimental to the country’s future. There would likely be ramifications that would significantly impact the war against IS and the country’s unity.

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Cracks in Iraqi-US relations

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Cracks in Iraqi-US relations

Last week’s visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi to Washington highlighted the widening gulf in the Iraqi-US partnership, writes Salah Nasrawi

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi stunned the Obama administration during a visit to Washington last week when he told journalists that the White House was unhappy with the Saudi-led military campaign against Houthi forces in Yemen which he warned could engulf the Middle East in war.

Al-Abadi’s criticism of the US-backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen and his claims of the White House’s dissatisfaction with the mission prompted a swift denial from the Obama administration and the Saudi ambassador in Washington Adel Jubeir.

Whether scripted or not, Al-Abadi’s comments have underlined serious problems in the Iraqi-US relationship and have far-reaching implications for how Washington is engaged in Iraq’s political and security crises.

Since the US troop pullout in 2011, the Iraqi-US relationship has had many ups and downs but has worked largely by disguising key differences over several intertwined issues, mostly leftovers from the era of the decade-long US occupation of the country.

But many of the new disputes, which centre around broader regional policies and approaches to resolving and managing regional conflicts, seem to have made the Iraqi-US relationship more lopsided, and thus more fraught, than ever before.

While in Washington Al-Abadi took aim at the Saudi-led military campaign against the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen. He explained his worries that Saudi airstrikes might be a precursor for a more assertive Saudi military role in neighbouring countries, including Iraq.

Ordinarily, this should not have bothered Washington, which is committed by the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement with Baghdad to help strengthen “security and stability in Iraq” and enhance its ability “to deter all threats against its sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity.”

But Al-Abadi’s remarks seemed to have gone too far in unravelling the paradox in Iraqi-US relations and underscoring the Obama administration’s fractured and even contradictory Middle East policies.

For Al-Abadi and the rest of the Iraqi Shia, the US’s expanding role in Saudi Arabia’s campaign against the Houthis in Yemen is not helpful either in combating terrorism in the region or in easing mounting Shia-Sunni tensions.

For the Iraqi Shia, US support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen looks like a tale of hypocrisy that rules the world.

What is puzzling to the Iraqi Shia-led government is that while US President Barack Obama has called on the Gulf nations to use their influence on Libya’s warring factions to help resolve the chaotic situation there, US drones flying over Yemen transmit the information that Gulf jetfighters use to attack targets in Yemen.

Obama’s invitation to the leaders of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies for a meeting at Camp David next month “to discuss ways to enhance partnership and deepen security cooperation” may also increase the Iraqi Shia-led government’s fears about Washington’s gamble.

One of the scenarios for the upcoming summit is that the United States may propose to help the Saudi-led camp to acquire a similar status to Iran, both with an internationally recognised nuclear programme and a reinforced regional posture.

This feared scenario, if materialised, could initiate a trilateral relationship between the US, Iran and the Saudi-led camp that Washington will hope will ensure regional equilibrium and enhance stability.

But such a perception ignores the fact that the dynamics of Arab-Iranian relations are further complicated by historical, nationalistic and sectarian enmities and regional competition.

Worse, without regional institutions to achieve its goals it remains questionable whether such an innovation on the multilateral front would amount to something that could usefully be considered as the basis for new regional arrangements.

In this regard, Iraq’s concerns remain immediate and focused. Al-Abadi’s warning in Washington about Iraq being within the radar of Saudi Arabia was actually a message to the Obama administration that it needs to be more sensitive to concerns that its approach to Saudi Arabia could turn the conflict in Yemen into an all-out regional sectarian war.

Furthermore, it could encourage the kingdom to launch a similar campaign against Iraq or Syria.

Another sign of fissures between the Iraqi Shia-led government in Baghdad and Washington is over differences in conducting the campaign against the Islamic State (IS) terror group in Iraq.

Since it started some ten months ago when IS captured vast swathes of territory in the country, the two sides have sharply differed on policies and the military strategies needed to beat IS and take back the land.

While Obama suggested a military strategy of airstrikes to “degrade and ultimately destroy IS” coupled with a political approach that called for Sunni inclusion in Iraq, the Baghdad government resorted to Shia Iran for help in battling IS.

Iran has been supporting Iraq with weapons, intelligence and training in the battles. But its main contribution has been in mobilising its elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to build a massive Iraqi Shia paramilitary force that has been effective in regaining control over Iraq’s Sunni provinces.

While the United States sees the Iranian involvement in the fighting in Iraq as possibly turning the war on terrorism into a sectarian war, the Iraqi government has criticised the “slow tempo” of the US airstrikes and their ineffectiveness.

Iraq complains of a lack of US intelligence and weapon supplies to the Iraqi security forces. Its main concern remains that the US military strategy to combat IS is not working and has even created further confusion in Iraq.

During Al-Abadi’s visit to Washington a key difference surfaced when Al-Abadi told reporters that the next step in military operations against IS fighters would be to try to roll them back in Iraq’s western Anbar Province.

In contrast, US top brass general Martin Dempsey said defending Ramadi, the Anbar provincial capital, was of secondary importance compared with protecting the Beiji oil refinery from IS militants, a stance even some Republicans in the US have criticised as minimising setbacks.

Earlier, the two sides had differed publically on when a military push to retake the northern strategic city of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, would take place. Again, US officials expressed concerns about the role of the Iran-backed militias in the offensive, while the Iraqis insisted that they should be in control of the timetable and tactics in the battle to retake Mosul.

The disagreements have been costly as Iraq has had to delay an offensive to take back Anbar following Washington’s insistence that the Shia paramilitary forces should not take part in order for the US to provide airpower support to the Iraqi troops.

As a result, the IS militants initiated a counter-offensive and seized more land in Ramadi this week, forcing tens of thousands of civilians to flee Ramadi and triggering a fresh humanitarian crisis in Iraq.

Iraq’s security forces had to reorganise and bring reserves from the Shia-led Popular Mobilisation Force in order to halt the militants from further advancing in Ramadi and threatening Baghdad.

One more sign of Iraqi frustration with Washington has been the latter’s failure to support Baghdad with the kinds of weapons it needs to fight IS. While in Washington Al-Abadi kept telling the media that the Iraqi security forces needed American weapons such as tanks and warplanes “badly”.

Nevertheless, he returned to Baghdad empty-handed and with only a pledge from Obama for $200 million in humanitarian support for those displaced by IS onslaughts.

The United States may have adopted certain policies in Iraq and the Middle East, but the Obama administration’s approach can hardly be seen as reflecting the true reality of Iraq’s and the region’s complex politics.

Its main deficiency is that it has failed to understand the region as it really is.

The confusion it has created has divided people in Iraq and in the Middle East between those who believe that the administration’s strategy empowers the Shia militias in Iraq and Iran, and others who see Washington as an ally in the war against the Shia.

At no time since it withdrew its troops from Iraq has the United States seemed so undone as a strategic partner because of its poor policies.

If there is one simple way of describing the US attitude towards Iraq, it is in the Iraqi proverb: “I won’t feed you. And I won’t let you beg.” That can hardly maintain a partnership based on trust and confidence.

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This article appeared  first in Al-Ahram Weekly on April 23, 2015