WILAYAH NEWS VOICE OF THE GLOBAL AWAKENING
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BAGHDAD — The infantryman and his colleagues were already worn down after six months of fighting militants in western Iraq, men flush with weapons and zeal. Army commanders had no answer for the daily deadly ambushes and no broader strategy for prevailing in the longer war.
The final straw was the death of a friend, killed two weeks ago by a sniper’s bullet. The infantryman, Bashar al-Halbousi, deserted, making the same choice as hundreds of other soldiers in his battalion, he said.
“The state is weak,” Mr. Halbousi said. “This will be an endless battle.”
After months of grinding conflict against a resurgent militant movement, the Iraqi Army is having its power blunted by a rise in desertions, turning the tide of the war and fragmenting an institution, trained and funded by the United States, that some hoped would provide Iraqis a common sense of citizenship.
Map | Where ISIS Is Gaining Control in Iraq and Syria The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — an organization once part of Al Qaeda — has effectively gained control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria over the past year.
In a nation tearing apart along sectarian lines, Sunnis and Shiites have served together in the military. But the defections of Sunni soldiers threatened to deepen the growing perception among Iraq’s Sunnis that the military serves as an instrument of Shiite power, even while Shiites soldiers have also fled.
The toll of the desertions came into sharp relief on Tuesday, as soldiers and their commanders abandoned bases in Mosul, all but ceding Iraq’s second-largest city to extremist fighters belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
The fleeing troops left weapons, vehicles and even their uniforms behind, as militants took over at least five army installations and the city’s airport. In a desperate bid to stem the losses, the military was reduced to bombing its own bases to avoid surrendering more weapons to the enemy. American officials who had asserted that the $14 billion that the United States had spent on the Iraqi security forces would prepare them to safeguard the country after American troops left were forced to ponder images from Mosul of militants parading around captured Humvees.
The crisis has been picking up momentum as Sunni extremists have gained power and territory across the north and west of the country — and as soldiers have been leaving their posts.
In interviews over several days, soldiers and army commanders said the desertions had become widespread, with thousands of men laying down their arms, gutting front-line units across the country. Before the troops dissolved in Mosul, the army was losing as many as 300 soldiers a day, between desertions, deaths and injuries, according to a security analyst who works with the Iraqi government and requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the military.
One former soldier who would give only his first name, Mohamed, because deserting is illegal, said that he had served in Ramadi and that his colleagues started deserting months ago as the deaths started mounting. “I felt like I was fighting armies, not an army,” said Mohamed, 24.
The militants came in waves, sending suicide bombers when their ammunition grew scarce. Mohamed said that eight of his friends had died and that he almost did, too, when a mortar shell struck his Humvee. When militants singled him out as a target for assassination, forcing him to flee, it was almost a relief.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Everyone is tired.”
The government has played down the scale of the crisis, in part by registering soldiers as “missing” rather than as deserters. Officials also blamed the problem on unrelated issues — saying, for instance, that soldiers were not returning from home leave, but only because roads leading to the battlefields had become unsafe.
Lt. Gen. Rashid Fleih, the commander of operations in Anbar Province, said last week that recent successes by the army in clearing several highways would resolve that issue. “Now the soldier who is on leave can go back to his unit without any problems,” he said. After the defeat in Mosul, though, the crisis could not be so easily brushed away. For the first time on Tuesday, the government publicly invoked the law forbidding desertions, threatening harsh punishments, including the death penalty, according to a media adviser for the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.
The government, though, seemed to have limited leverage. In interviews, several deserters cited the ferocity of the battle as their primary reason for leaving. They spoke of nerve-racking patrols in remote areas or in contested cities, surrounded, at times, by hostile residents. They searched booby-trapped houses and traveled roads full of bombs. Most terrifying, though, they said, were the snipers.
Their stories added detail to the brutal shadowy war between the militants and the army — the latest trauma for a country still reeling from the American invasion and occupation and the sectarian civil war that followed.
Some soldiers said their families begged them to leave the service. One 25-year-old deserter said his mother was so terrified of the fighting that she burned his uniform every time he returned home on leave. Two months ago, he said she raised the stakes, threatening to kill herself if he returned to his unit.
“We lost so many troops — I lost three or four of my friends,” said the former soldier, who was sent straight to the front line in Falluja after basic training. “The fighting was so fierce.”
The desertions threaten to transform Iraq’s vicious conflict into something even more dangerous, by starving the government of fighters as it struggles to recapture lost territory: in Falluja, which was taken over by the militants six months ago, and now in Mosul. With fewer men to face the militants, the army is relying on artillery and airstrikes — including, human rights workers say, the use of indiscriminate barrel bombs — increasing the risks to civilians.
As the army falters, Shiite militias are also playing a growing role in the conflict, nudged toward the fight by the government of Mr. Maliki. As the militiamen face radical Sunni jihadists, the threat of a wider sectarian conflagration grows.
The desertions of men like Mr. Halbousi — a Sunni in an army dominated by Shiites, the majority sect in Iraq — is another dangerous development. “It reinforces the sectarian polarization,” said Hayder al-Khoei, an Iraqi researcher and associate fellow with Chatham House, a policy research group in London.
So did the government’s statements, with its “not so subtle references to a religious war”— an echo of the jihadists’ sectarian speech, Mr. Khoei said.
But above all, the soldiers — young men from southern Iraq, or the outskirts of Baghdad, who joined the service for its relatively good salary — felt “abandoned,” Mr. Khoei said.
“They are thrown into this fire,” he said. “It’s a nightmare.”
Source: NYTIMES
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