Holy Lands by Nicolas Pelham

Author:Nicolas Pelham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780990976356
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

Counter-strike

With scant means to unseat IS themselves, some Sunni tribal elders responded to al-Abadi’s efforts to revive the Sahwa force of Sunni tribesmen his predecessor dissolved. Concerned for the fate of their tribal lands in the event of a government victory, tribal elders sent their representatives to Baghdad’s once luxury Al Mansour Hotel in the spring of 2015 to declare their allegiance to the Baghdad government, provided that any territory it recovered from IS reverted to their control.

But government officials had an unnerving way of talking about the liberation of Mosul, as if the battle was already won. Dates for a promised counter-attack came and went. The new Sahwa’s numbers didn’t quite stack up. In Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, 110 miles from Baghdad, 400 IS fighters held out against a 24,000-strong force for two months. Only after Americans began aerial bombardments did IS finally stage a retreat.

For all the official bravado, a victory parade in Mosul seemed a less-than-immediate prospect. IS forces in Mosul are some 25 times more than those in Tikrit, and are readily reinforced from Syria. As if doubting the likelihood of an early conquest, even the Americans focused their bombings on IS’s edges, stemming their further advance rather than threatening their nerve centers.

Nor, for all their trepidation of IS, is it clear that most Sunnis favor such an assault. Many have learned to mistrust promises of liberation since the Americans first marched into Iraq, fearing it might just herald a fresh bout of sectarian cleansing. When propounding his plans for retaking Mosul, Iraq’s prime minister insists he has the backing of Baghdad’s Abu Hanifa Mosque, the base of the capital’s Sunni clerical establishment. But when I went to see them, its clerics sounded unconvinced. “Why should militiamen from Basra in the south invade a city in the north?” asks the mosque’s spokesman Taha Hamid al-Zaydi, who once studied with al-Baghdadi. “It will simply make matters worse.” His rhetorical questions suggest a latent sympathy with Mosul’s new order. “What is more important, killing a human or the toppling of stones?” he asks when I protest IS’s destruction of some of the world’s oldest antiquities. “Only mosques built over graves have been destroyed.”

Each time I try to talk to him about IS, he lists the crimes the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad continues to commit against Sunnis. In their conquest of Tikrit, Shia forces separated men and women, raping the latter and killing the former. “Life is normal in Mosul,” al-Zaydi says. “People of Mosul are more afraid of the future than of the present. We fear huge massacres to come.” As we leave, my driver tells me that al-Zaydi’s underlings in the corridor had joked about how much ransom I might fetch.

Although Shia militias pushed IS out of three central provinces—Diyala, Saladin, and by December 2015, most of Al Anbar—its forces quickly regrouped. Like a game of whack-a-mole, IS’s position astride the Syrian-Iraqi border helps it vanish from one town only to surface in another. No sooner had it retreated from Tikrit than it entered the southern suburbs of Damascus.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.