Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Op-Ed Contributor

To Save Mosul, Arm the Sunnis

Sunni fighters gathering this month in Shirqat, Iraq.Credit...Reuters

WASHINGTON — Iraq’s prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, has said that by the end of the year Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, will be liberated from the Islamic State’s control. As of this month, Mr. Abadi, a Shiite, has had two years to rebuild the Iraqi Army with the support of an international coalition. Unfortunately, the institution remains incapable of liberating Mosul on its own, forcing Mr. Abadi to rely on Shiite militias — many of which serve as Iran’s proxies in Iraq — to conduct the war.

Meanwhile, Sunni Arabs — the one group in Iraq that should be given a major role in liberating its own areas — have been marginalized and sidelined by the government in Baghdad.

The marginalization of the Sunni community has been a common theme since 2003. Former Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s political exclusion of Sunnis helped contribute to the rise of the Islamic State. Today, there is a new prime minister, but the same disastrous policies. As the speaker of Parliament, a Sunni Arab, acknowledged, the door is closed for Sunni Arabs to join the fight.

This is a mistake, and one that Washington should work urgently to correct. Preventing Sunnis from liberating Mosul will destabilize Iraq into the foreseeable future.

The Sunnis have the capacity and the willingness to fight. But they lack the support. Some 20 miles northeast of Mosul, a group of some 2,000 Sunni Arab tribal fighters, working with local political leaders, are training. They are from Mosul and nearby towns, willing and able to fight the Islamic State to reclaim their homes, protect their neighbors and relatives, and defend the city’s infrastructure, which will be needed to rebuild the economy. Unfortunately, these brave Iraqi citizens are not given air support or the necessary military equipment by Baghdad.

In its previous battles to liberate Sunni cities from the Islamic State, Iraq’s central government has followed one of two strategies. In the city of Tikrit, the government deployed Shiite militias to help the army’s forces. This resulted in looting and mass killing. In other cities, like Ramadi, the government chose instead to rely primarily on air bombardment. While this prevented militiamen from committing war crimes, the results were still disastrous: According to local officials, nearly 80 percent of the city was destroyed.

Mosul is the largest city that the Islamic State has captured. It is also overwhelmingly Sunni. The only way to liberate the city and minimize bloodshed is to involve the local population. To invite Shiite militias into Mosul would prompt a huge backlash from local residents. Some would even join the Islamic State, viewing the extremist group as the lesser evil, compared with Shiite militias.

For hundreds of years, Sunni Arab tribes have dominated the area to the west of Baghdad all the way to the Jordanian and Syrian borders. My tribe, Zobaa, is only one of scores of tribes in that area. Unlike the Iraqi Army, which is dominated by Shiite Arabs that hail from the more southern provinces of Iraq, these Sunni Arab tribes are fully committed to defending their territories themselves.

These honorable men have risked their lives in the war against extremists before. From 2006 to 2008, Sunni Arabs fought and defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq in a movement, spearheaded by local tribal leaders and working in coordination with American forces, known as the Anbar Awakening. The Awakening became so central to stabilizing Iraq that George W. Bush visited Anbar Province to express his gratitude.

The Awakening was the most important factor in contributing to the decline of violence in 2007 and Al Qaeda in Iraq’s loss of territory. Patriotic Iraqi tribes — not a corrupt government — saved Iraq from dissolution. But that stability and sacrifice was squandered by the sectarian policies of Mr. Maliki’s government.

The tribal fighters are ready and able to once more defeat extremism and safeguard their territories. Leaders from the Sunni community have had countless meetings in Baghdad and Erbil. We have continuously expressed our concerns to American officials about the government-backed Shiite militias and their role in the military campaign against the Islamic State.

The United States should withhold support if these militias take part in the Mosul operation. Instead, Washington should arm Sunni tribesmen from Anbar and Nineveh Provinces. These forces — including the 2,000 based near Mosul city — can fight alongside selected Iraqi Army units, such as the Nineveh Operations Command, the Iraqi counterterrorism units and the Ninth Armored Division.

Unfortunately, American officials have turned us away, insisting that we can take part in the liberation of our own areas only if the central government in Baghdad approves. This is disappointing and counterproductive. It is the tribal forces that have the crucial local knowledge — not only of the terrain but also of its people, many of whom are their relatives. The Sunni civilians will trust the tribes to protect them.

But Mr. Abadi, like Mr. Maliki before him, fears that the Sunni tribes will threaten the Shiite-led order in Baghdad. This fear, promoted by Iran and its hard-line Shiite allies in Iraq, is misplaced. The Sunni Awakening forces never extended into territory populated by Shiites or areas where Al Qaeda in Iraq was not present. Moreover, depriving Sunni tribes of arms does not make the government safer. Had the tribes been armed and supported by the government in 2014, the Islamic State would not have captured as much Iraqi territory.

The liberation of Mosul will be complex and costly. But it can be much less so if the city’s residents support, rather than fear, their liberators.

Jamal Al-Dhari is president of the Iraq National Project.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: To save Mosul, arm the Sunnis. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT