By Ferry Biedermann
The Financial Times, 17 January 2006
Seen through a bullet-proof window in an armoured truck – with a heavy machine gun on the roof, security vehicles ahead and air support nearby – the Iraqi people in western Nineveh province look happy.
Young shepherds wave from the muddy fields to the passing US army convoy, and the Iraqi army and police manning the checkpoints snap smartly to attention when the trucks thunder by.
The Tel Afar district, a mixed Turcoman, Kurdish and Sunni Arab area some 150 miles northwest of Baghdad, is held up by the American military as one of the success stories of the “multi-national” forces in Iraq.
This time last year, the region was known as the “Fallujah of the North” after it had become an important staging point for what the American commanders call “the terrorists”.
After action last September called “Operation Restoring Rights”, the commander of the 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment, or 3ACR, Colonel ‘HR’ McMaster, says his men “lifted a pall of fear” from the population. He gives graphic descriptions of kidnappings, murders, beheadings and random mortar fire into children’s playgrounds, before the operation.
But a self-appointed council of Nineveh province – comprised of notables, sheikhs and ulema (clerics) – put out a statement in late December that complained bitterly of persecution of the Sunni population in Tel Afar. It demands an international inquiry into the “truth of what is happening in Tel Afar, of the extreme use of force and the use of internationally forbidden weapons...”
The statement claims the Sunnis are being ethnically cleansed from the Tel Afar region and the nearby city of Mosul, and it blames Kurdish and Shia militias that it says are part of the Iraqi army.
The area borders on the Kurdish autonomous area in the North and is subject to a constant tug of war between ethnic groups. The statement says the Kurds are intent on annexing parts of Nineveh province while the Shia Badr brigades, associated with the SCIRI party that dominates the government in Baghdad, say they have come “to break the noses of the Sunnis” as they enter towns and villages in the province.
At the forward operating base of Sykes, just outside Tel Afar, Col McMaster and his men dismiss much of the talk about Badr brigades as exaggerated. They say they work closely with the third division of the new Iraqi army based in the area and deem the quality of the Iraqi leadership as “excellent”. Rather than posing a problem, the Iraqi army in their view is part of the solution.
“We have made partnering with the Iraqi army our number one priority,” Major James Gallivan, the regiment’s operations officer says. He and Col McMaster want to put the Iraqi army, and the police – now being reconstituted – up front to gain the trust of locals.
The American officers say they are aware of the precarious ethnic and religious mix, as it was also exploited by insurgents to stir up trouble. They say they encourage the police to have “representative” and mixed units in all parts of the town and that they have impressed upon the army and police leadership the importance of fairness and the rule of law vis-a-vis the local population.
From within the confines of US military facilities it is hard to gauge if this has borne fruit. But statistics on the 3rd Iraqi army division are not encouraging. More than 40 per cent of its men are Kurdish and the rest are overwhelmingly Shia, with only some 10 to 15 per cent Sunnis.
In the past, the Kurdish soldiers, predominantly former fighters against Saddam Hussein’s Sunni- backed Ba’ath regime, have followed their own nationalist agenda. During Operation Restoring Rights a Kurdish brigade from Irbil was included and Shia-dominated ministry of interior troops arrived, but “they were kept in the outlying areas.”
Col McMaster and his officers say the operation in and around Tel Afar has been a resounding success. The number of violent incidents has dropped dramatically. The main indicator that things are moving in the right direction, they say, is that ordinary Iraqis now provide increasing amounts of valuable “human intelligence” on militants in their midst and increasingly straight to the Iraqi army and police, rather than to the American forces. This shows, they say, that people are no longer intimidated.
But the attacks – albeit at a lower level, less organised and less sophisticated – continue, pointing to a remaining reservoir of mainly Sunni resentment at being dominated by other groups locally and being governed by mostly Shia politicians in Baghdad. In the past, US forces thought they had achieved success, only to see it crumble when their own power waned, for example during a troop rotation.
The 3ACR was in Western Anbar province – including the restive towns of Fallujah and Ramadi in 2003 where trouble increased after they pulled out. And the militants around Tel Afar were able to capitalise on the troop rotation when they took over there in April and May 2004.
Maj Gallivan says this time things are different, “because now the Iraqi troops have the prime responsibility for security, not the coalition troops.”
He contends that in the case of a total withdrawal of US forces, the 3rd Iraqi army division “will stand and fight. They will not fall or fade away as happened in the past.”
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Citation: Ferry Biedermann. "Tel Afar’s ethnic tug of war puts Iraq army to the test," The Financial Times, 17 January 2006.
Original URL: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/61e40b36-877e-11da-8762-0000779e2340,s01=1.html
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