Arbil: As Iraq comes closer to ejecting Daesh from its last major stronghold in the country, the question is no longer whether it can succeed.
The question is whether it will all have to be done again someday.
Even a complete military victory over the extremists in Mosul will not change the reality that there is still no political agreement in place, or even basic trust, that could reconcile Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority with the Shiite-dominated national government.
Not only are there fears that another Sunni insurgency could rise after Daesh is beaten, but there also seems to be little beyond this immediate military campaign to unite the profoundly differing factions that have temporarily come together to fight the militants - government forces, Sunni tribesmen, Kurds, local Yazidis and Christians, and Iran-backed militias. Each has a different endgame in mind.
While the fighting has raged near Mosul, diplomats, analysts and tribal sheiks who oppose Daesh have been meeting in hotel ballrooms in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, to start a discussion about reconciliation and political reforms. They agree, at least, that those are critical steps to prevent Daesh from gaining new footholds in Sunni communities down the line.
“The reasons that created Daesh still exist,” said Mohammed Muhsin, a tribal sheik from Hawija, a Daesh-controlled town near Kirkuk. Speaking at a workshop in Arbil organized by the US Institute of Peace and an Iraqi organization, Sanad for Peacebuilding, he ticked off the reasons: poverty, injustice, marginalization.
After years of abuse and exclusion by the government and its Shiite militia allies, some of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs welcomed Daesh in 2014 as potential protectors - in part because many of the militants were from those same communities.
Now many Sunnis say they are weary of Daesh rule, and are ready to welcome even Shiite forces as short-term liberators. But they still fear revenge attacks and more exclusion from the government and its allies, as the forces that clear Mosul also bring in a large swath of the Sunni population under suspicion of being collaborators or hidden Daesh members.
No one thinks the guns will fall silent for long.
“The problem is, the politics are against us,” said Hassan Nusaif, a Sunni Arab politician from Hawija, who also participated in the recent reconciliation workshop in Arbil. “Let me be honest with you: The bloodshed will continue. This is the reality.”
This critical gap between battlefield successes and political progress reflects a running theme throughout the long US involvement in Iraq: Each military victory seems to further shake loose Iraq’s divisions, leading to more political disagreement and fighting.
Some analysts warn that the Iraqi government and the Obama administration may be risking even more chaos by pushing an all-out military campaign against Daesh before any political arrangement to accommodate aggrieved Sunnis is reached.
In a paper published by the Brookings Institution, Ian A. Merritt and Kenneth M. Pollack warned that defeat of Daesh in Mosul “will likely expose the deep sectarian tensions and grievances that have been somewhat masked by the common struggle against it.”
Ramzy Mardini, of the Atlantic Council, warned of “a new, and perhaps more deadly, civil war.” And Dylan O’Driscoll, of the Middle East Research Institute, based in Arbil, wrote that given the depth of Sunni marginalization, “liberating Mosul under these circumstances will only result in Daesh or another radical entity returning in the future.”
US officials acknowledge that political measures have lagged behind the military progress. But Brett McGurk, President Barack Obama’s envoy to the international coalition fighting Daesh, told reporters recently: “The problem here is that if you try to resolve all of these issues, Daesh will remain in Mosul for the foreseeable future and perhaps forever.”
In the fears expressed over what comes after the Mosul campaign are echoes of the missteps and chaos that followed the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In particular, there is the problem of how to handle the many Daesh collaborators assumed to be among the 1 million-plus people left in Mosul. As with the controversial policy of de-Baathification imposed by the Americans after the invasion, a debate is underway about a process some are already calling “de-ISISification.” ISIS is an an English acronym for Daesh.
The worry is that a campaign to purge all who might have collaborated with Daesh will go too far by targeting innocents or relatives of the militants, and sowing the seeds of future dissent. To bring order to this process, there is talk of the Iraqi government setting up a special tribunal in Mosul to hear cases, with the Iraqi bar association providing free legal defense to detainees.
On the ground, a critical aim of the central government is to place local Sunnis in charge of security in Mosul after it is cleared. That may help avoid abuses by the Shiite-dominated security forces, whose mistreatment of the local population under the former prime minister, Nouri Al Maliki, contributed to Daesh’s capture of Mosul in 2014.
But even that is no guarantee of security, because of conflicts within the Sunni community between those who supported Daesh and those who opposed it, which many worry will lead to rounds of revenge killings.
With no wider framework for reconciliation, Osama Gharizi, the regional programme manager at the US Institute of Peace, has been working at the grass-roots level across Iraq.
He has been bringing tribal sheiks together to agree on ways to avoid further violence. Some of the ideas include negotiating compensation payments to forestall revenge killings; ending collective punishment by protecting innocent family members of Daesh militants; and agreeing on timetables for the return of displaced residents.
Gharizi said the workshops have yielded results in places like Tikrit, where bloody score-settling after a massacre of nearly 1,700 Shiite military recruits by Daesh was largely avoided.
Mosul, he said, will be more complicated because of its diversity. The area has been home to numerous minorities - Christians, Yazidis, Shabaks, Kurds - all of whom have suffered.
“Bottom-up approaches will only get so far, and are in need of a national reconciliation process that will tackle some of the main grievances related to the political system and governance framework,” Gharizi said.
Others hold out hope for that most Iraqi of solutions: The rise of a powerful figure to bring the country together. Some versions of that longing, at least, picture more of a benign unifier than the kind of authoritarian strongman Iraq has become known for.
“Until now, there is no Mandela in Iraq,” said Muhsin, the local leader from Hawija. “We need a Mandela in Iraq. We need to push the Iraqis to be like South Africa, and we need to create a Mandela.
“How are we to do this?” he added. “I don’t know.”
