The Wall Street Journal - With ISIS on the Run, an Unexpected Leader Emerges in Iraq

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July 3, 2017. Ben Kesling.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who generated few expectations, stitched together a military alliance and damped sectarianism.

MOSUL, Iraq—Three years ago, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the existence of an Islamic State caliphate and proceeded to sweep his forces through northern Iraq and toward Baghdad, threatening the viability of the fragile country.

Today, the leader declaring an end to the caliphate is someone few would have imaginedin the position, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. A man seen as the favorite of none but acceptable to all, the 65-year-old former electrical engineer has managed to turn that tepid sentiment into a defining strength.

Over nearly three years in office, Mr. Abadi has narrowed gaps between Iraq’s warring Shiite and Sunni politicians. He balanced competing interests among geopolitical rivals Iran and the U.S., and spearheaded an overhaul of Iraqi security forces, who had fled advancing Islamic State fighters. Iraq is close to retaking Mosul, Islamic State’s psychologically important stronghold.

“Abadi has magnificently shifted between leading and balancing,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “If he led too much then there’d be too many alienated people, and if he balanced too much there would be no forward progress.”

Today, Iraq’s security forces are on the verge of defeating Islamic State, the key requirement if the nation wants to enjoy a stable and cohesive future, despite daunting challenges that remain. Sectarian anger still simmers, and the country’s economy and infrastructure have been devastated by years of fighting.
“Abadi is riding high,” said one U.S. official in Washington. “But the government needs to show that it can act to make people’s lives better, and probably the window for that is pretty limited. If it doesn’t, all that goodwill Abadi built up will diminish.”

There wasn’t always such a sense of possibility in Iraq. Before Islamic State swept to power in 2014, the country was at its most-fractious since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Mr. Abadi’s predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, was a polarizing figure, accused of fueling sectarian conflict and packing ministries with loyalists.

Transparency International ranked the country near the bottom at 171 of 177 countries world-wide for corruption, with such pervasive problems that the country has only moved up a few positions after years of attempted overhauls. Mr. Maliki didn’t respond to a request for comment, but Sunday released a public statement praising the military and militias.

When the festering Syrian civil war next door bled across the border, Iraq’s military crumbled. In June of 2014, militants exploited Iraq’s problems to blitz into Mosul—grabbing nearby land, stores of weapons and oil fields. In Islamic State’s advance, millions of civilians came to live under the Sunni extremist group’s rule.

Some Sunnis initially welcomed the militants as an alternative to the predominantly Shiite government of Mr. Maliki. The implementation of Shariah law followed, where people could be jailed for smoking or executed for unauthorized use of a cellphone.

Amid the turmoil, the conciliatory Mr. Abadi was tapped to become prime minister, an antidote to Mr. Maliki’s divisive rule. He faced growing alarm among Iraq’s allies.

Iran, the world’s biggest Shiite-majority country, couldn’t countenance its neighbor falling to a Sunni extremist group. In 2014 Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the pre-eminent Shiite cleric in Iraq, called on fellow countrymen to rise up to help protect the country; Shiite militias formed that Mr. Abadi has both empowered and theoretically kept under central government control. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’s elite Quds Force decided to fund and train many of them.

Ayatollah Sistani, who typically makes public statements via a representative at Friday prayers, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

On the Run

With victory in Mosul near, Iraq is getting closer to defeating Islamic State.

Islamic State control Islamic State support/attack zones

Note: Due to an update in methodology, some areas of control may have slightly shifted position since 2014.

Source: Institute for the Study of War

For Iran, forging such a partnership offered a way to cultivate a new proxy in Iraq and also to nurture others. Iran could revive overland supply routes through Iraq and its other ally, Syria, to Lebanon, where the Shiite political and militant group Hezbollah is based.

For Mr. Abadi, the relationship provided a backstop to a buckling Iraqi military. It also offered a skilled battlefield partner in Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s heavy involvement in Iraq also exposed Mr. Abadi to accusations that he was turning his country into an Iranian pawn.

An official in the office of Iran’s United Nations representative didn’t return a request for comment on Iran’s relationship with Mr. Abadi.

U.S. State Department officials mostly sidestep the thorny issue of Iran’s involvement in Iraq’s war against Islamic State, saying Baghdad was ultimately in charge of the powerful Shiite militias. As part of this balancing act, Mr. Abadi courted the U.S. military for assistance, too, just years after the Americans pulled troops out of the country.

In 2014, the U.S. military started a gradual increase of troops with the launch of Operation Inherent Resolve. By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, more than 5,000 Americans were deployed to Iraq with hundreds close to the front lines of combat. Support has increased under President Donald Trump.

Iraq has benefited from a more than billion-dollar investment by the U.S. to train and equip conventional army troops and special operations forces, and fund U.S. troops in the country. Mr. Abadi also fired generals from the Maliki era and demanded that top officers eschew sectarianism. Those steps brought increased assistance from the U.S., including advanced weapons and air support.

Comparing the current force to that of just a decade ago, when U.S. forces were still leading many operations, Lt. Col. James Downing, a U.S. Army adviser who is near the front lines in Mosul, said, “they are infinitely more capable.”

As the war with Islamic State heated up, Iraq became a tinderbox of crisscrossing rivalries and sectarian tensions. Christian and Sunni minorities in Iraq grew wary of Iran’s growing influence, with those groups forming some of their own militias.

Some Iran-friendly Shiite forces, meanwhile, became openly hostile to U.S. troops. In late 2015, multiple militias pledged to fight U.S. troops if they deployed to Iraq and established bases in the country, harking back to their efforts against Americans during the Iraq war.

Mr. Abadi sought to keep everyone on the same side, largely by lauding the benefits of a unified Iraq, adding Kurdish and Sunni elements to his cabinet and reaching out to Sunni leaders for dialogue.

From the beginning of his tenure, the Iraqi prime minister reached out to Sunni Arab countries in the region while maintaining his ties with Iran. In 2015, the Saudi government reopened its embassy in Baghdad, which had been shuttered decades before in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

Inside Iraq, Mr. Abadi begin to win over the country’s minority Sunnis.

“This government led by Abadi has not met desired levels of ambitions, but if you compare it with the previous government, you will find a big difference,” said Ahmed al-Masari, head of the Sunni political bloc in federal parliament. “Now there are reforms and progress, while during the previous government several provinces fell to terrorism.”

Renad Mansour, a fellow at Chatham House, a London-based internationally focused think tank, said Sunni leaders came to realize a flexible Shiite leader may be their least bad option, especially if they hoped to exercise some power as a minority group in a democratic Iraq. “The Sunnis are past their denial of reality,” he said. “They realize that they’re going to be a minority.”

Mr. Abadi didn’t neglect the country’s Shiite majority either. By 2015, Ayatollah Sistani, arguably the most revered figure in the country, voiced strong support for Mr. Abadi and worked to ensure the militias remained by law ultimately under Iraqi government control. Mr. Abadi in turn has praised the cleric, even this week saying his call to form militias was a crucial move to save the country from Islamic State dominance.

In marshaling foreign and domestic support, Mr. Abadi’s government began racking up wins. In mid-2015 Iraqi forces took back Tikrit from Islamic State, their first major territorial victory. In November 2015, Kurdish Peshmerga forces pushed into the northern town of Sinjar, and the Iraqi military soon declared the Anbar hub of Ramadi free from militant control. The city of Fallujah fell months later.
In Mosul, where an offensive began last fall, Islamic State didn’t retreat but dug in deeper. Even as Iraqi forces surrounded the city and advanced, the militants used hundreds of thousands of civilians as human shields while stockpiling munitions and setting up snipers’ nests in the warrens of the old city.

Today, Iraqi forces are fighting scattered pockets of Islamic State fighters.

In east Mosul, shops selling mobile phones or fashionable jeans have reopened next to restaurants slicing up kebabs. Patrons smoked openly, even during the holy month of Ramadan—a display unthinkable under Islamic State control.

Still, seeds of new conflicts are just below the surface.

Iraqi soldiers are accused of beating and summarily executing unarmed men and boys fleeing fighting in the heart of Mosul. The most recent allegations come from a Human Rights Watch report released Friday. Because the military is seen as a Shiite institution and Mosul is predominantly Sunni, such abuses, real or even rumored, threaten to fan sectarian tensions.

The Iraqi government will investigate any credible cases of abuse, according to Saad al-Hadithi, a spokesman for Mr. Abadi, but he said those allegations must be based on evidence and not hearsay. Mr. Abadi has said he wouldn’t tolerate any human-rights abuses by troops.

In Anbar Province, tribal officials have exiled families of Islamic State members. In the city of Mosul, the city council recently passed a resolution declaring the same. Mr. Abadi has signaled he will use his federal authority to prevent the local government from taking such actions.

Mosul mobile-phone salesman Forat Latif said the environment is ripe for another antigovernment group to lure Sunnis into more fighting.

“We will go back to the same environment that created Daesh,” he said. “It’s the same cloud that brought all this rain.”
Iraqi officials recently released a 10-year $100 billion reconstruction plan. The government doesn’t have the money, and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund haven’t come forward with funds. Last year, the IMF provided a $5.3 billion dollar emergency loan to help stabilize the country—a sizable contribution at the time but a fraction of what is needed now. Large sections of major cities like Ramadi and Mosul have been destroyed, with buildings, bridges and water mains turned to rubble.

During his tenure, Prime Minister Abadi has overseen an increase in oil production, which helped boost the country’s GDP last year by 11%, according to the IMF. Yet low oil prices have complicated Iraq’s efforts to pay government workers, who have sporadically taken to the streets to protest, and the non-oil sector of the economy is still reeling.

One of the biggest challenges for Mr. Abadi is the pressure from different Iraqi minorities for more autonomy. The Kurdish north, led by President Masoud Barzani, has been angling for independence for years, and last month announced it will hold a referendum on the issue in September.

Federal elections are scheduled for April, and Mr. Abadi may face rivals for his position. He has managed to remain on good terms with both Iran and the U.S.—with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson praising the prime minister publicly in March.

But as the relationship between the U.S. and Iran deteriorates, there is a risk that Iran will back a challenger to the prime minister more clearly in Tehran’s camp. Mr. Maliki has remained a constant presence in the political realm.

Mr. Abadi may face his biggest test when Iraq and its foreign allies no longer share a common foe.

On Thursday, as he declared the end of the caliphate, Mr. Abadi stayed focused on defeating Islamic State. “We will continue to fight Daesh until every last one of them is killed or brought to justice.”

On the same day, though, brownouts in Baghdad left millions without power, showing the government’s limited capacity to provide public services to its people. Four improvised bombs, meanwhile, detonated in different areas of Baghdad, killing a handful of people. Such attacks are a reminder that the war against Islamic State is moving beyond the battlefield and into the daily lives of Iraqis, something they had hoped a prime minister would prevent.

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