Just under a decade ago (September 2005) the United States Army in coordination with the Iraqi Army scored a much needed tactical victory. They cleared the Iraqi city of Tal Afar of Al-Qaeda terrorists killing and capturing many of them. And they briefly secured it. At the time it was lauded by Washington with then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice forward it as a general strategy which could win the Iraq War. She dubbed it, “Clear, hold and build.”

The idea being that the U.S. military could clear most of Iraqi areas of insurgents, help the new Iraqi government secure it, garner the trust of local populations and help them re-build their communities and homes. In Tal Afar that only worked for a brief time. The Department of State encapsulated the feeling of the time when it described the situation there as follows,

‘Terrorists who once exercised brutal control over every aspect of the city have been killed, captured, driven out, or put on the run. Children are going to school, electricity and water service are restored throughout the city, and the police force better reflects the ethnic and religious diversity of the communities they patrol. Markets are opening, buildings are going up, and homes are being repaired.’

Unfortunately today Tal Afar, situated in Nineveh, is, along with the major metropolis of Mosul, still under the grip of the Islamic State (ISIS, Daesh) group. Daesh are even worse than their Al-Qaeda predecessors who tried to subjugate Tal Afar nearly a decade ago.

Indeed it wasn’t in Nineveh Province but Anbar Province where the U.S. claimed its strategy for securing Iraq was working. When General David Petraeus paid off many of the Sunni tribesmen and guaranteed to help them fight Al-Qaeda forces in their midst during the 2006-08 period of the Iraq War.

That was also lauded at the time. Unfortunately we see that in both Nineveh and Anbar the jiahdis, now in the form of the much more sinister form of Daesh, have come back with a vengeance. And they have eviscerated any tincture of progress in both those provinces and still remain entrenched in them. The U.S. no longer has 160,000 combat troops on the ground with which to help in operations against Daesh. It wants to maneuver something like a repeat of the aforementioned ‘Anbar Awakening’ against Daesh. The U.S. administration presently appears set to send a few hundred more training advisers to Iraq to assist the Iraqi Army and the Sunni tribesmen force Daesh out of Anbar. However the Iraqi Army has had few successes on the battlefield against Daesh as their recent setback in Ramadi aptly demonstrated. And Shia militias, many of whom backed by Iran, are replacing their role and taking the forefront in the battle against Daesh there. They are fighting under the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU’s) which is a relatively thin veneer over what amounts to extremely limited, even largely non-existent, Iraqi government command-and-control (Iraq’s poor Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has very fine lines to walk in other to maneuver the many disparate elements amassed in the fight against Daesh in a desirable direction). Nevertheless, the Sunni tribesmen of Anbar recognize that as a force on the ground these forces are likely their best, perhaps only, chance of forcibly uprooting Daesh from their land. And once the Shia militias do it in coordination with them and they are gradually trained and armed to re-consolidate control over their land and their homes the day after Daesh is removed by force.

I know the ‘clear, hold and build’ strategy has dubious prospects given its aforementioned record but, nevertheless, a strategy resembling something like that could work given the fact it is carried out primarily by Iraqis. One of the mistakes the former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki made, in my view, was not integrating these tribesmen under a broader security auspices. That rendered many of them, unfortunately, helpless when it came to mounting a sufficient resistance campaign against Daesh as it usurped their lands and subjugated them under its completely ruthless and tyrannical rule.

Let’s hope these mistakes and shortcomings of the past are not repeated and that the plethora of Iraqi groups fighting Daesh work in tandem for what is good for the future of Iraq as a whole.

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