Juan Cole: One Year After the Fall of Mosul, Is Iraq Winning the War Against ISIS?

http://www.thenation.com/blog/209681/one-year-after-fall-mosul-iraq-winning-war-against-isis

The Baghdad government’s genuine successes against Daesh in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces put the capital out of danger for a long time and demonstrated that the vicious theocracy was hardly invincible. These victories required a motley combination of Shiite militias, rump Iraqi army units, Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps advisers, sometimes support from the Kurdish paramilitary and Sunni clans, and American and other coalition close air support and bombing raids. The Americans and their allies destroyed the medium weaponry it had captured from the Iraqi army in Mosul, and which gave it an advantage over Shiite guerrillas. Without that advantage, it was guerrilla on guerrilla, and the Shiites are perhaps three times as numerous. The upside of defeating Daesh, pushing it away from the capital, and demonstrating that its fighters were not ten feet tall had a downside. Shiite militias and Iranian advisers took the lead in these operations, given an anemic Iraqi military that had largely collapsed. At Tikrit, there were 3,000 government troops and 20,000 Shiite militiamen, along with a thousand Sunni fighters. For Iran-backed Shiite militias to take Tikrit was a symbolic humiliation of the Sunni Arabs and did nothing to attract Sunni support for the effort against Daesh, even though most Iraqi Sunnis oppose its brutality and extreme fundamentalism.

Even if Baghdad does nothing differently, it seems to me likely that over time it will prevail against Daesh by brute force and by virtue of its many allies, from Iran to NATO to Russia, and because of the overwhelming demographic superiority of the Iraqi Shiites (likely 60 percent of the Iraqi population versus some 17 percent for the Sunni Arabs). Not to mention that the Shiites have as allies in this endeavor the Kurds, who, though mostly Sunnis, practice a far different form of Islam than Daesh or are secular-minded, and who want to see the organization crushed. But this process of purely military rollback will be ugly, in the way that the Jurf al-Sakhr and Tikrit campaigns were ugly. To many Sunnis in Iraq and in the Gulf, this reconquest looks like an alien branch of Islam oppressing Sunnis rather than like a rescue of the Sunnis from the bestial brutality of Daesh (its theorists promote “acting like beasts” or tawahhush in Arabic, as a means of cowing the population). Prime Minister al-Abadi needs to move much more quickly to build a non-sectarian Iraqi army. And, he needs to get over his fear of arming the Sunni population willing to fight Daesh, or he is in danger of losing key Sunni allies to Daesh.