It is understandable that American and Iraqi officers are taking a victory lap after the capture of Ramadi from ISIS. On a visit to Iraq, Marine General Joe Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this weekend: “I believe the Iraqis now have the momentum.”
That may be true but, heartening as the fall of Ramadi was, a number of caveats are in order.
Caveat No. 1: Ramadi is still not fully secure. Two weeks after Iraqi forces declared victory, ISIS continues to hold out in the suburbs. And they left so many booby traps behind that Iraqi forces are still reluctant to move around the town center freely while civilians are still not coming back.
Caveat No. 2: To save Ramadi, the coalition destroyed it. Thanks to U.S. air strikes and ISIS bombs, much of Ramadi has been reduced to rubble. The New York Times had a telling quote from one Iraqi officer: “In one neighborhood, he stood before a panorama of wreckage so vast that it was unclear where the original buildings had stood. He paused when asked how residents would return to their homes. ‘Homes?’ he said. ‘There are no homes.’”
Rebuilding will be a monumental task, and it’s not clear how Iraq can afford to do so when oil is trading at $32 a barrel, a 12-year low. And that’s even assuming that Iraqi’s Shiite-dominated government is interested in sharing oil revenue with this Sunni city, which seems unlikely.
Caveat No. 3: While the battle of Ramadi was billed as a victory for Iraq’s non-sectarian military — and not for Shiite militias – Shiite extremists remain amply represented within the ranks of the Iraqi military. In fact, the Iraqi army has been purged of non-sectarian officers in recent years. The result is that it is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the Iraqi army and the Shiite militias. A New York Times reporter who visited Ramadi found: “The Iraqi Army had little presence, limited to staffing artillery posts and running checkpoints outside the city, some of which provocatively flew the flags of Shiite martyrs.
The Shiite sectarian bias of the army and government of Iraq will make it hard to win Sunni support even if ISIS has been evicted from Ramadi. And that, in turn, will make it hard to hold Ramadi or to take back other areas, such as Fallujah and Mosul, from ISIS.
Caveat No. 4: Perhaps the most important caveat of all is that the Ramadi operation did not vindicate the fighting abilities of Iraq’s army, which has been on the ropes since the departure of their American partners at the end of 2011. It seems that almost all of the fighting in Ramadi was done not by the regular Iraqi military but by the Counter-Terrorism Service; a small, specialized special operations command that is not part of the dysfunctional Ministry of Defense. It answers directly to the prime minister. The CTS was always the best part of the Iraqi military, and so it remains, in no small part because it has been insulated from political pressure and corruption, lavished with resources and training, and provided lots of American support, both from the CIA and the U.S. armed forces.
The problem is that the CTS is small. Although it is said to have some 13,000 personnel, most of those are not “operators.” According to a Brookings report by retired U.S. Special Forces Colonel David Witty, the striking force of the CTS is composed of three battalions each one with 440-600 personnel. That means there are no more than 1,800 “operators” that CTS can deploy — and it is unlikely to be able to use all of them at once. To avoid burnout, these commandos need time for leave and training.
Backed by copious U.S. airstrikes, CTS was just barely big enough to take Ramadi, which was largely depopulated before the assault began (there were no more than 30,000 civilians remaining), and defended by only a few hundred ISIS fighters. It’s a different story in Mosul, which, although it lost population under ISIS rule, still has an estimated 1 million residents and is said to be defended by thousands of ISIS fighters. Even backed by lots of American airpower, it will be hard for CTS to take Mosul by itself. So far, efforts to train regular Iraqi army units have shown limited success, at best.
In sum, the success in Ramadi is only a baby-step forward. ISIS remains far from defeated in Iraq, much less in Syria. Operation Inherent Resolve (as the Pentagon has dubbed the anti-ISIS campaign) remains far from a success. There is much work to be done to defeat ISIS and still little sign that President Obama will do what is necessary, which would involve sending more American forces, loosening their rules of engagement, and appealing more directly for Sunni support.
