The victorious Iraqi troops who greeted us this winter in the newly liberated town of Bartalla on the edge of Mosul seemed so different from those I remembered from the mid to late 2000s that it was hard to believe they came from the same country. These guys were, to put it in American military slang terms, squared-away, high-speed, and locked-on to the nth degree. They looked, moved, and spoke not just like real soldiers but like professional Western combat troops.
Back then, in the mid-2000s, many if not most U.S.-trained Iraqi units tended to be sloppily unimpressive in dress and demeanor. Away from the parade ground (on which they could usually pull off a decent approximation of Soviet-style marching) the jundis, or ordinary soldiers, carried their Kalashnikovs any old way, sometimes dragging the muzzle through the dirt. Their brown and tan U.S.-pattern uniforms were ill-fitting. On their feet they wore sneakers or even sandals. Their helmets were wonky. Their new standard-issue body armor looked pathetically homemade. They looked unprofessional, and to a depressing degree they were.
Junior officers were often unfit and lazy, resisting the pleas of U.S. Army trainers that they do PT like their men. (In general they were baffled by Western notions of leadership, especially the insistence by Americans than an officer should be able to complete any task expected of his soldiers at least as well as them.)
Senior officers had better uniforms than their jundis but were invariably as fat as pashas. Their British-style belts stretched across bellies whose size was a status symbol as it is for so many traditional elites across the Third World. (One of the ways coalition forces could spot Baathist apparatchiks after the defeat of Saddam’s regime in 2003 was by the fact they were so much better fed than everyone else.) Sometimes their U.S. advisers could motivate them to feed, house, and properly equip their men only by offering status-enhancing bribes like helicopter rides or shiny new pistols.
If Col. Norville “Tex” De Atkine, the author of the celebrated, tragically ignored 1999 paper “Why Arabs Lose Wars” had wanted living illustrations of his thesis, he could hardly have done better than to have picked random officers from the “new” Iraqi army’s officer corps at that time.
It was therefore not surprising that after President Obama prematurely pulled U.S. forces out of the country in 2011 the quality of Iraqi generalship grew even worse, reaching its nadir when corrupt, incompetent, and cowardly senior commanders abandoned their own brigades and simply ran away when ISIS attacked cities like Mosul in 2014.
These new Iraqi soldiers in Bartalla wore black fatigues and black watch caps or baseball caps, matching the dust-encrusted color of their armored Humvees and MRAP vehicles. They were carrying American M4 carbines rather than AKs, and holding them like people who know how to use and maintain the weapons on which their lives depend. They had proper body armor with plates, and were shod in desert boots rather than sneakers. They even moved differently from the Iraqi troops I remembered, exuding a quiet, battle-hardened confidence (as opposed to popinjay arrogance).
Also evident was a unit identity and esprit de corps of a kind all but unimaginable a decade ago. The insignia on their shoulders revealed them to be members of Iraq’s 1st Special Operations Forces, also known as the “Golden Division” or the Counter Terrorism Service. Trained and advised by the 101st Airborne, they report to the Ministry of the Interior rather than the Ministry of Defense. They are said to have been much less affected by ethnic and sectarian divisions than other Iraqi units, though there were reports that they were misused by Nouri al-Maliki, the former prime minister, as a kind of Praetorian Guard after the U.S. drawdown in 2011,
This day the Golden Division troops were buoyed up by the speed with which they had taken the depopulated Christian town, not least because, as one of their majors told me, it meant that ISIS fighters had not had time to sow the streets with IEDs and the houses with booby traps.
It would be a mistake to make broad assessments about the overall state of the Iraqi armed forces based on an encounter with one of the country’s elite units, or to read too much into their appearance. After all, 16 years into the Global War on Terror you can see local soldiers and policement from Kabul to Timbuktu carefully emulating the look of U.S. special operations troops, sporting knee pads and ski goggles even on sentry duty, strapping combat knives onto their body armor. These guys in the Golden Division pull it off better than most—though understandably none wear the beards that have become de rigeur among American special forces units during the last decade: That would convey very much the wrong message in the war against beard-obsessed ISIS.
While on the subject of facial hair, one of the things that made the Iraqi troops at Bartalla look so different from their predecessors of a decade ago is that many of them have none at all. It’s hard to explain to people who don’t know the region just how rare it is to encounter Arab soldiers —even Arab men generally—without mustaches. As one jundi explained to me in Baghdad a decade ago, “Here only homosexuals don’t have a mustache.” When U.S. forces first arrived in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion, they were actually given special dispensation by the Pentagon to grow mustaches so that the locals didn’t see them as effeminate. For these elite Iraqi troops to go completely clean-shaven is not just an expression of confidence in their own masculinity, it possibly implies that they have assimilated the culture of their coalition mentors in the way that Indian troops absorbed that of their British officers during the Raj.
That said, it’s not clear why or how key parts of the Iraqi army have finally got their act together or why the lessons imparted by U.S. trainers and advisers now seem to stick. It could be because of the shock of near-defeat: It was an extraordinary achievement by ISIS that, despite its inferior numbers, it was able to conquer half the country and threaten the Iraqi capital itself in 2014. Or it could merely be that it takes a long time and a lot of exposure to a genuinely professional modern warfighting army like that of the United States to change and improve a rotten military culture.
But no matter how good Iraqi units like the Golden Division may be, the challenges they have been facing in the battle for Mosul are tremendous. Urban warfare against a well-prepared and dug-in enemy is always difficult. And ISIS is an especially dangerous opponent. As has become clear during the last two years of fighting, ISIS adapts its tactics and makes use of new technology with remarkable speed.
For example, as has now been widely reported, ISIS possesses and uses drones effectively both for reconnaissance purposes and as miniature bombers. Last October an ISIS drone even dropped a bomb on a French base in the Kurdish capital of Erbil.
Most coalition casualties are still caused by skillful use of IEDs and suicide car bombs. But ISIS also has high-tech weapons systems like the Russian Kornet anti-tank missile (thanks to its capture of Iraqi Army bases in 2014) that further enable it to challenge the Iraqi and Kurdistani forces’ U.S.-supplied tanks and armored vehicles.
Moreover, the so-called Caliphate is making extensive use of the tunnel warfare techniques pioneered by Hamas in the Gaza strip. One tunnel discovered by Kurdish Peshmerga forces in a town on the edge of Mosul was five miles long. The French writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has recently completed a second powerful documentary about the Peshmerga, was shocked to come across large, well-appointed tunnel systems even in small, strategically unimportant villages.
Disdainful of the laws of war and unconcerned by local or global public opinion, ISIS ruthlessly exploits human shields and civilian hostages to slow down the Iraqi-Kurdish advance, as LTG Stephen Townsend, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition, recently pointed out.
It should not be surprising that the ISIS fighters defending Mosul know what they are doing. Their commanders, many of whom were soldiers in Saddam’s army before they joined the Sunni/Baathist “resistance” that evolved into ISIS, are battled-tempered survivors of more than a decade of brutal warfare, much of it against the likes of the U.S. Marines.
While the last remaining ISIS-controlled parts of Mosul (in the older, densely populated Northwest of the city) will likely fall to the coalition this year, the savage house-to-house fighting has taken a severe toll on the Golden Division and other elite forces, including those of the Peshmerga. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
This is partly because, although ISIS has already lost its image of invincibility and will lose more prestige, and international recruiting ability once it is driven from both Mosul and Rakka, it is unlikely to disappear. It will probably reconstitute itself in different form, one less concerned with taking or holding territory.
The depletion of properly trained and effective non-sectarian forces like the Golden Division is also problematic because once Mosul has been liberated, Iraq will likely need them to stave off the threat of civil conflict. The danger is not so much a war against the Kurdistan region—no government in Baghdad would be so foolish as to take on the Kurds today—but one involving the various well-armed militias and Hashd al-Shaabi “popular mobilization units” recognized and paid by the state and often supported by Tehran. Yet a third danger might be that an exhausted, decimated Golden Division could revert to a more familiar cultural type, and become a new version of Saddam’s Special Republican Guard or a Shiite equivalent of the Waffen SS.
Right now though, it’s a gratifying relief to encounter an American-trained, 10,000-man Iraqi military force that, after all these years, is not only capable of fighting ISIS but actually does credit to both the U.S. military and the Iraqi people.
Jonathan Foreman is the author of Aiding and Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures and the 0.7% Deception (Civitas).
