Fighting for their own country, their own way
Intel Dump
By Phillip Carter
Greg Jaffe had an exceptional piece in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) describing the rise of "irregular" Iraqi units around the country, which were popping up on their own, raised by individual officers, funded privately, with little connection to the U.S.-led effort to raise an Iraqi army. Surprisingly (or maybe not so), these ad hoc units appear to be better led, better equipped, and more combat effective than their "official" brethren. And, perhaps more importantly, some U.S. officers are recognizing this, and figuring out how they might co-opt or work together with these Iraqi forces.
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In the battle against insurgents here, two kinds of Iraqi military forces are emerging: the planned units and the pop-ups.
The planned units of the Iraq Army, about 57,000 soldiers strong, are the result of careful preparation this summer between the U.S. and Iraqi commanders. The pop-ups started to emerge last fall out of nowhere, catching the American military by surprise. These dozen disconnected units totaling as many as 15,000 soldiers are fast becoming one of the most significant developments in the new Iraq security situation.
The unplanned units -- commanded by friends and relatives of cabinet officers and tribal sheiks -- go by names like the Defenders of Baghdad, the Special Police Commandos, the Defenders of Khadamiya and the Amarah Brigade. The new units generally have the backing of the Iraqi government and receive government funding.
While regular units of the Iraq Army have taken up residence on rehabilitated army bases, the others camp out in places like looted Ministry of Defense buildings, a former women's college, an old Iraqi war monument and an abandoned aircraft hangar. Frequently, U.S. officials don't find out about them until they stumble across them. Some Americans consider them a welcome addition to the fight against the insurgency -- though others worry about the risks.
"We don't call them militias. Militias are...illegal," says Maj. Chris Wales, who spent most of January tracking down and finding these new forces. "I've begun calling them 'Irregular Iraqi ministry-directed brigades.' " The "pop up" label comes from other U.S. military officials in Baghdad.
Troops who might have otherwise joined the regular Iraqi Army are drawn to these units because they are often led by a particularly inspirational commander or made up of people with similar tribal and religious backgrounds. This makes the units more cohesive and potentially effective against the insurgency. "Just show us where to go and we will eat the insurgents alive," an Iraqi in one of these units told Maj. Wales earlier this month when he tracked them down at a long-shuttered Baghdad airport.
Mr. Jaffe's article continues that these units do carry some risk, in that they are not folded into the regular command structure, and thus at risk for fratricide and other problems. Nonetheless, senior U.S. officers see a great deal of promise here:
As these irregular units proliferate, U.S. officials face a thorny dilemma: whether to encourage these forces, whose training and experience varies wildly, or to try to rein them in. "There is a tension between on the one hand encouraging and fostering initiative and on the other executing the plan for the Iraqi Security Forces that everyone agreed on," says Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who is overseeing the massive U.S. effort to help train and equip Iraqi military units. "To be candid, I would err on the side of fostering initiative. I want to get the hell out of here."
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On Col. Coffman's recommendation, Gen. Petraeus visited the Commandos' base and was impressed with the troops. "When I saw them and where they were living I decided this was a horse to back," the U.S. general says today. He agreed to give the fledgling unit money to fix up its base and buy vehicles, ammunition, radios and more weapons.
Unlike many of the U.S.-trained Army units, the Commandos, whose ranks today include several thousand soldiers, have had few deserters. In early January, insurgents crashed a car bomb into the gate of the unit's base, killing six Iraqi recruits who hoped to join the Commandos and injuring dozens more. Some of the injured went to the hospital, got bandaged up and then returned to the base that afternoon still eager to join.
Forty-three Special Police Commandos have been killed in battles with insurgents since September and about 300 have been wounded, U.S. officials say.
Part of the reason that the unit inspires such allegiance is that all of their recruits are hand-selected by Gen. Thavit and Gen. Mohammed. By contrast, most Iraqis who join the regular Iraqi Army are recruited at a half-dozen joint U.S.-Iraqi-run recruiting stations and lack the cohesive bond and pride that grows out of being handpicked.
"The reason the Commandos are special is that a couple of great leaders at the top have just flat out put their imprint on that organization," says Gen. Petraeus.
Analysis: The essence of "foreign internal defense" (FID), which is essentially what the mission to train Iraqi forces is, is to leverage the existence of an existing warrior class and to build it into a fighting force capable of accomplishing common goals. One of the most important things that must be done at the outset is to find those warrior-leaders and warrior-soldiers capable of raising arms against their enemies. FID doesn't work like conscription; you can't take a citizenry and transform them into a fighting force with these kinds of methods, at least not without a lot of time and effort. FID works best when you can co-opt an existing band of brothers -- like the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan -- and embrace it with U.S. precision firepower and C4ISR capabilities.
Thus far, our efforts to train Iraqi security forces have not followed this FID model -- and they have floundered. We have attempted to transform a group of average citizens in Iraq into soldiers capable of going toe-to-toe with some very bad guys, and ultimately, being able to kill their fellow citizens. It takes a lot to create that kind of a force; it takes years to inculcate that kind of skill, professionalism and warrior ethos. We may be able to impart the basics to the Iraqi security force personnel -- such as how to shoot and maintain their weapons, conduct a squad patrol, etc. But it's a giant leap from that baseline of proficiency to what these "pop up" units have: a fighting spirit.
The U.S. would be well advised to mimic its past success in Afghanistan by finding more warriors like the ones in these units, and enlisting them in the common cause of Iraqi security. Lt. Gen. Petraeus had it right -- let's train the Iraqis to handle their own security as quickly and effectively as possible, so that we can bring our men and women home |
