Ah Yes, the Success of Tal Afar

President Bush:

The progress of the Iraqi forces is especially clear when the recent anti-terrorist operations in Tal Afar are compared with last year's assault in Fallujah....

Many Iraqi units [in Tal Afar] conducted their own anti-terrorist operations and controlled their own battle space -- hunting for enemy fighters and securing neighborhoods block-by-block. To consolidate their military success, Iraqi units stayed behind to help maintain law and order -- and reconstruction projects have been started to improve infrastructure and create jobs and provide hope.

From a September Washington Post piece, filed from Tal Afar:

As in the past several days, Iraqi soldiers drawn primarily from the Kurdish pesh merga militia led the operation, joined as always by U.S. Special Operations soldiers, distinctive with their unkempt hair and facial stubble.

U.S. commanders have praised the performance of the Kurdish forces during the operation, while privately expressing concern that their tactics sometimes verge on being heavy-handed.

In a briefing the night before the morning operation, Lt. Col. Christopher Hickey, commander of the 3rd ACR's 2nd Squadron, instructed the Special Operations soldiers working with the pesh merga to avoid alienating residents.

"We lose these people if we go in there and tear people's homes apart," Hickey said.

By 8 a.m., nearly 400 people were assembled, squatting or seated in the dirt beside the road. Two of the men had bloodied faces and spots of red soaking through their green dishdashas.

"They tried to grab my father, and I said, 'He is old, you don't need to take him,' " said one of the men, whose upper lip and right ear were swollen and bleeding. "They hit us with their fists and their rifles."

Many of the men's hands were bound so tightly with plastic cuffs that their circulation was cut off, so U.S. soldiers cut the bindings and instead wrapped their hands with thick green tape.

Before boarding trucks and returning to their base, the Kurdish soldiers lined up behind the detainees and posed for digital pictures. They threw packages of food and bottles of water to a large group of children assembled across the road, many of whose fathers had been detained.

Some children picked up the gifts, but several grabbed them and threw them at the departing army vehicles.

Soldiers and some neighborhood children gave the detainees food and water as they waited in the 100-degree heat for trucks to arrive to transport them to Camp Sykes. A woman in a long purple dress and white head scarf shouted at the remaining soldiers in Turkish, and others began to gather behind her.

"I give this 30 minutes before it gets out of hand," said Sgt. 1st Class Herbet Gadsden, surveying the scene. "We have to get these people out of here before their families go nuts."

At noon, two trucks arrived. Soldiers lined up the detainees, photographed each one with a digital camera and loaded them aboard. The crowd of family members faded back into their homes. "Another day of making friends," Hanners said, shaking his head.

Can someone remind me: Which page of the sure-to-win "Victory for Iraq" plan explains how we should rely on thuggish rebadged militia men?

 

P.S. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say that simply training Iraqi troops isn't going to do it.

Comments

[Zathras]

Eric, I think your readers get the point by now. From what I've read elsewhere, the people actually involved with training in Iraq, from the recently-returned Gen. Petraeus on down, understand it too.

Training is all we've got. It may well not be enough, but it's better than nothing, and if the insurgency diminishes the incentives to thuggishness and ethnic aggression may too. If it doesn't, they won't.

[Eric Umansky]

Zathras,

I disagree, on a few levels. Now I'm obviously biased, but I don't think most people know about the sectarian make-up of the Iraqi army and certianly not the effects it's having. And I think even fewer people know about how the "Iraqi army," such as it was, conducted itself in Tal Afar.

As for training being the only game in town: I went out of my way to emphasize that I, of course, agree we should be training as much as we can. And yes, I'm sure Petraeus and others are sensitive to the sectarian makeup of the army.

I don't have any easy answers. Should the U.S., say, accept peshmerga units wholesale into the army, essentially just rebadge them? I would lean against it, but it's not an easy. But that's not the end of thigns: Should those units then, say, be put in the lead of assault against a city mainly populated by people (turkoman, I believe)who have historical beef with the kurds? And then when they go in and, big surprise, abuse residents and thus increase ethnic tensions, should that then be celebrated as a success of the new Iraqi army? I hope not, but apparently our president (should he know the details of the operation) disagrees.

[Zathras]

Fine, Eric, but what is your alternative? Frankly, I don't think you have one, easy or otherwise, which makes your criticisms a little too easy.

Look, I don't mean to go off on you personally, because a number of people are making the same kinds of criticism of the way we are rebuilding the Iraqi army and police. Every one of them gives far too little weight to the fact that if you live in Iraq and you are not a Sunni Arab, you have been massively provoked, for decades by Saddam's regime and for the last two-odd years by the insurgency. Given that the insurgency continues and that there has never been any expression of shame or contrition on the part of the Sunni Arab minority, you have to expect a certain amount of hostility on the part of anyone likely to want to carry a weapon for the Iraqi government. (I do know the Tal Afar incident involved a Turkoman population, but this is a relatively small minority in Iraq that reportedly had hosted a sizable number of foreign terrorist elements in Tal Afar, making this situation both somewhat ambiguous and atypical).

It is absolutely true that Iraq would be a rough neighborhood in the best of circumstances, and also that the bloodthirsty Shiite variant of Islamism that has run Iran for the last 25 years has probably gotten a foothold among some of the Shiite Iraqi militias. The fact remains that in the face of an insurgency like this one, our best efforts to keep the desire for revenge from finding expression are bound to face strong resistance. The longer the insurgency continues, the worse this situation will get. Looking at Iraq as a whole, we do not see a problem with "ethnic tensions." We see instead one group waging ruthless war against all the others. Frankly, it is nothing short of amazing that so much time has passed with so little retaliation from Iraq's Shiites and Kurds.