Iraq's Silver Bullet in the ISIS Fight

Seth J. Frantzman

Security, Middle East

Iraq’s Sunnis are fighting back on their own terms with Hashd al-Watan.

“The reason for the collapse of Nuri al-Maliki’s army and the conquest of Mosul in 2014 and other Sunni areas by Daesh [Islamic State] was the failure of the Iraqi government regarding Sunnis,” says Gen. Sa’adi al-Obaidi. Sitting in a small air conditioned caravan in the middle of a military base around thirteen miles east of Mosul, the general and several of his senior officers gathered around a table on July 15 to explain why they have joined Hashd al-Watani, or the National Mobilization Force. The unit of several thousand men has been training for two years to retake Iraq’s second largest city from ISIS, alongside Kurdish peshmerga forces in northern Iraq.

On July 9, the Iraqi army captured an airbase next to Qayyarah, forty miles south of Mosul. This offensive, led by the central government in Baghdad, has been closely coordinated with Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve. On July 11, U.S. defense secretary Ash Carter said 560 more Americans were on the way to Iraq to “support Iraqi security forces as they move forward with the Mosul operation.”

However the operation to retake Mosul is hampered by the fact that many Sunnis fear the role of Iranian influence and Shia militias. Cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi were subjected to mass destruction in the house-to-house fighting used to clear them from ISIS. The key to the liberation of this large city will be the role of Sunni Arabs, as well as the Kurdish peshmerga whose front line in Bashiqa is only ten miles from Mosul city. There are an estimated 1.7 million refugees in the Kurdish region, many of them minorities such as Yazidis and Christians from around Mosul, and Sunni Arabs from areas of Iraq.

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