The Baghdad surge – Volume 13, Issue 4 – May 2007

The Baghdad Security Plan or ‘surge’ that began in mid-February 2007 will reach its peak in terms of troop deployments by June, with the number of US soldiers in Iraq topping 160,000. General David Petraeus, commander of multinational forces in Iraq and the man responsible for implementing the plan, has repeatedly stated that success will need to be measured in the political and not the military arena. Overall, victory or defeat will be judged on whether the surge can create the space in which Iraq’s divided communities can reach a sustainable political settlement.

 

The plan is divided into two specific phases, with separate and clearly distinguishable aims. The first phase, from February to June, is focused on securing the central areas of Baghdad on both sides of the Tigris river. Its key goals are to reduce the alienation felt by the country’s Sunni population and to halt the widespread ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad that has taken place since the destruction of the al-Askariyya Mosque in February 2006. During 2006, the Jaish al Mahdi, the Shia militia run by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, had used its base in eastern Baghdad as a platform from which to purge Sunni-dominated areas of western Baghdad. Previously affluent suburbs like Mansour and Yarmouk were targeted for violent population transfer. Militia campaigns of murder and intimidation were combined with the withdrawal of banking services and health care, forcing the Sunni population into a shrinking enclave in western Baghdad and gradually pushing them out into Anbar province. By early 2007, before the surge was launched, the western suburbs of Baghdad, Mansour, Yarmouk, Ameriya and Ghazaliya, had become increasingly deserted, their markets and shops closed, their populations trapped inside their houses or forced to flee.

 

This violence forced the US to focus military activity on west Baghdad. The security plan set about replacing the makeshift blockades erected by the local population with concrete barriers, designed to impede the movement of both death squads and car bombers. Gated communities were set up behind these perimeter walls. The US army oversaw the clearing of armed groups from each area, conducting local censuses and then putting an identity card system in place, aiming to deny death squads access and stopping the areas becoming a launch pad for insurgent violence. By March and April this approach had clearly begun to bear dividends. The rate of sectarian murders had fallen considerably, a limited number of formerly displaced Sunnis had returned and economic life had been rejuvenated in the shopping and market areas west of the Tigris.

 

Once specific areas had been secured, the barriers built and the security stations staffed, American battalion commanders used their Commander’s Emergency Response Programme funds to begin rebuilding governmental services in the areas they now controlled. Local councils were empowered to hire street cleaners, sewage systems were renovated, schools redecorated and reopened, and electricity sub-stations repaired. However, this tentative recovery was based upon the delivery of highly local security, centred on a number of small forts, Joint Security Stations and forward operating bases scattered across the city and managed by the US military. The improvements in security, infrastructure and economic activity were dependent upon US military funds and were delivered at a local level, through the capacity of the US battalions which controlled each area.

 

A marked increase in sectarian-motivated violence in April, the third month of the surge, indicated that the militias and insurgent groups had reorganised. Although a US-led military campaign in January had driven al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) out of its stronghold along Haifa Street in the Kark area on the western banks of the Tigris, this did not reduce its ability to deploy mass violence. Instead, AQI shifted its resources into terrorist ‘spectaculars’, launching suicide car bombs into predominantly Shia areas, to reignite the vicious sectarian cycle of atrocity and counter-atrocity. On the other side of the civil war, the Shia militias, especially Jaish al Mahdi, chose not to fight superior US forces but stood down, merging back into their host communities, retaining their weapons and capacity. Their leader, Moqtada al-Sadr, fearing for his life and unwilling to confront the US with an extended rebellion, fled Iraq to exile in Iran.

 

 

For the Baghdad Security Plan to be successful and deliver sustainable security, US forces need to attain two difficult and diverse goals in the surge’s second phase, from June until its end, currently thought to be scheduled for April 2008. The first is military. The final wave of US troops that arrive in June will be sent to Baghdad’s outer suburbs, the so-called city ‘belts’, where much of the violence now originates. Their task will be to seek out and defeat both AQI and Jaish al Mahdi. To be successful, US forces will, over the summer, need to enter Moqtada al-Sadr’s east Baghdad stronghold, Sadr City. This slum, neglected for decades by the Ba’athist government, is thought to contain over two million of Baghdad’s 6m population. If the US military manages to gain control of it, to impose security and to begin rebuilding its crumbling infrastructure, it will have made a major dent in the geographic, military and political foundations of Sadr’s strength.

 

Secondly, the American military will have to impose control on the turbulent areas surrounding Baghdad, where AQI has relocated. These are situated to the east of Baghdad in Diyala province, and to the south. Diyala, an area with a mixed Sunni and Shia population, has seen a steep increase in violence since the Baghdad Security Plan began. AQI, restricted in its ability to operate in Baghdad, has fomented religious tension in Diyala instead. This violent instability will need to be curbed over the summer to prevent the area being turned into a new platform for AQI to launch attacks against Baghdad. To the south of the capital are the three towns of Muhamidiyah, Lutifiyah and Yusufiyah. This area sits on a sectarian fault line: high levels of violence have earned it the moniker the ‘triangle of death’. It was here that Saddam, in the final years of his rule, deliberately encouraged the growth of Sunni Islamic radicalism, so that the area would act as a barrier that separated Baghdad from the Shia holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. The continued capacity of AQI to operate in this area, bounded by both the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, was highlighted in mid-May when four US soldiers and their interpreter from the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain division were killed and another three kidnapped by Sunni Islamic radicals. In this largely rural area, divided by a myriad of agricultural canals, the US military will need to open up a second front against AQI.

 

As General Petraeus recognises, the ultimate success of this final American attempt to create stability in Iraq will not be delivered in the military but in the political arena. The momentum delivered by the surge is meant to trigger and ultimately be sustained by the transformation of the Iraqi state. The first political target of the surge is the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki itself. The US administration has voiced profound doubts about the motives and capacity of the prime minister and his government. However, since America’s diplomatic and military effort lacks the time and leverage to replace him, Maliki is the most important vehicle for delivering the political goals of the Baghdad Security Plan. US success in Iraq is dependent upon Maliki’s willingness and ability to reform his government.

 

The most important political goal is to deliver significant and sustained Sunni participation in the political process. There are two major problems. First, in the four years since regime change, the Sunni community has failed to produce a competent and popular political elite that could claim to speak for it. The hope is that provincial and local elections, scheduled over the next 12 months, might aid this process. The second problem hindering Sunni participation in the political process is the behaviour of the Iraqi government itself. The Maliki government is dominated by the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a large, unwieldy coalition built to maximise the Shia vote in the two elections of 2005. Once in power, elements within the UIA used their positions in government to pursue a sectarian agenda and exacerbate communal tensions. This involved denying resources and government services to Sunni areas. In addition, the police force and Ministry of Interior became highly politicised and were used in sectarian cleansing and murder. In order to reduce drastically the Sunni community’s feeling that the Iraqi government does not serve it, Maliki would have to send a powerful message that his government was sincere in its aim of ruling over the whole population, deploying its resources to benefit all. A series of high-profile sackings would be required, removing a number of sectarian actors currently employed in senior government positions. The prime minister would be indicating to civil servants and to the Sunni community that sectarian behaviour in government is not tolerated.

 

Maliki also has to tackle a much more difficult and longer-term issue: the slow rebuilding of government capacity. The harsh international sanctions placed on the Iraqi state from 1990 until 2003 were successful in drastically reducing the ability of government institutions to function. The three weeks of looting triggered by the US capture of Baghdad in April 2003 shattered what was left of the state’s capacity, destroying 17 of Baghdad’s 23 ministry buildings. The de-Ba’athification order issued by the US occupation in May 2003 then removed what was left of the state – its institutional memory – by purging the civil service of its top layer of management. Attempts over the following four years to rebuild Iraqi state capacity have been hampered by the fact that Iraq has had three separate governments since sovereignty was handed back in April 2004. As each government took office, new ministers cleared out the senior staff of each ministry, further debilitating what was left of Iraq’s technocratic civil service. Against this background, Maliki has to overcome his constitutionally weak position and impose greater governing coherence on the Iraqi state and its troublesome ministers.

 

There have also been problems in the US government’s effort to rebuild the Iraqi state. After sovereignty was handed back to the Iraqis with the disbanding of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the task was given to a new authority, the Iraq Reconstruction Management Office (IRMO). Well funded by Congress and managed by the State Department, the IRMO was not judged a success: it became overly bureaucratic and faced difficulties in attracting skilled personnel. It was replaced in May 2007 by the Iraq Transition Assistance Office. In addition, provincial reconstruction teams, made up of American civilian experts embedded with the US military, whose task is to increase government capacity from the ground upwards, have also had difficulty recruiting personnel and may have insufficient capacity or managerial coherence.

 

The lack of Iraqi state capacity is indicated by the fact that in 2006 the government failed to spend $12.5 billion of its own budget owing to a lack of skilled personnel, institutional capacity and governmental will. The Baghdad Security Plan, by dramatically increasing the number of US soldiers on the ground and the power of their battalion commanders, is delivering improved security and reconstruction at a local level. However, the institutional and political incapacity of the Iraqi government means that this progress remains highly local and is not sustainable over the long term. General Petraeus is correct in identifying the solution to Iraq’s problems as political, but there are grave concerns as to whether the main vehicle for delivering those solutions, the Maliki government, has the capacity or the will to deliver the tough decisions needed to turn US military advances into Iraqi political success.