Fallujah offensive risks handing propaganda victory to Daesh

My memory of Fallujah is of roads leading to the city, of fields of swaying date palm trees, which my Iraqi friend Thaier once told me represented the souls of the country’s people. “They are symbols of our hopes and dreams,” he said, pointing to the lush fields along the Euphrates, on a trip we took crossing Iraq east to west and north to south, in the late winter of 2003. It was shortly before the invasion that crushed all those hopes and dreams.

Today, more than a week into the United States-backed Iraqi forces’ offensive on Fallujah, that trip seems very long ago, in the distant land that once was Iraq. The road north of Fallujah is a road of bleak war — of mortars, rockets and bullets. It is brown and gutted and veined in places with tunnels built by Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) during their occupation there for the past two years. An Australian farmer who had come to Baghdad in 2010 told me, as he sifted the dirt in his hands, that the land was so “traumatised” by war it would take generations for nutritious food to grow. While the US-backed Iraqi forces, aided by Shiite militias (backed by Iran), are now pushing back Daesh in Fallujah, farming or any form of ordinary life has vanished. Along with Daesh, there are also 50,000 civilians trapped in the centre of the city who may become (that horrible phrase) collateral damage. They are vulnerable to mortar and rocket attacks and terror: Reports of Shiite death squads roaming the streets conjure up memories of another heavy-handed military “clearing operation” — in Tikrit in 2015, when many civilians fled their homes as Daesh positions were encircled and pounded. Looming large is yet another catastrophic humanitarian situation. The Norwegian Refugee Council says only 867 people from Fallujah have managed to reach displacement camps since the fighting began on May 21. Its Iraqi country director, Nasr Muflahi, says it doesn’t have enough water to give them once they finally get to safety. “How could we ever look Iraqis fleeing Fallujah in the eye if we had to let them down just when they reach our camps?” he says. No water, shelling, fear of reprisals, endless killings. How much more can the Iraqi people take? During the first Gulf War in 1991, civilians in Fallujah had suffered the highest casualties among Iraqis, according to Human Rights Watch. A decade ago, US marines fought in Fallujah, patrolling the streets, kicking down doors to root out insurgents (many of them foreign fighters). Thousands died. The name itself — Fallujah — has become synonymous with failure.

And what of the long-term effects of this harrowing conflict? Any child born after 2003, who has managed to survive these last 10 years — including living under Daesh rule for the past two years — will no doubt be infused with hatred, vengeance and sorrow. In terms of geopolitics, the battle for Fallujah will also fuel sectarian and ethnic divisions, which will have reverberations well beyond the Anbar province.

On a trip to Iran this spring — the first time I was granted access to the country in 15 years — I was momentarily hopeful. I felt, perhaps naively, that the post-sanctions Shiite giant could move towards a greater harmony with its Sunni neighbours — in particular, the Saudis. But it was rather idealistic. The combination of blood-letting in Syria — where Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighters aid President Bashar Al Assad against opposition militias aided by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and others — and the Iranian involvement in Iraq will certainly not lead to healing. Arab papers have recently highlighted that the Iranian Major General, Qasim Sulaimani, is leading the offensive, along with other Shiite militias backed by Tehran.

The marginalised Sunni population in Fallujah, and throughout Iraq, is at odds with the Iraqi government and coalition forces. And Daesh has now exploited their vulnerability by creating an alternative narrative — that this is a Shiite-based action that will wipe out Sunnis. We only know too well the ruthlessness of Daesh and how it will use innocent people trapped in Fallujah to exploit its message. Hassan Hassan from Chatham House notes that the current offensive plays into Daesh’s twisted chronicle of being “custodians of the Sunni people” and providing them with a gift, for which, Hassan says, “they have long waited”. The flushing out of Daesh from Tikrit, former Iraqi president late Saddam Hussain’s home town in March 2015, has left distrust and anger among the Sunnis. The current battle of Fallujah will do far worse.

A fierce and clumsy military clearing operation will further alienate the Sunni population from the Iraqi state. The US-led coalition broke Iraq when it dismantled the country, but did not stick around long enough to fix it or help build a new government. It left the people to rot, just like the roads outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, where the “haves” — the ambassadors, the United Nations representatives and the political elite — live and work. In the Red Zone, real people live and work, where nothing actually seems to work. “There remains grave concern of potential human rights abuses against the Sunni citizens of Fallujah during the ongoing battle,” General Mick Bednarek, who had served in Baghdad from 2013 to 2015, tells me. “It is very sensitive. If the Shiite militia groups ... stay on the outskirts of the city ... then there is a chance for success without political backlash.”

Lieutenant Colonel Scott Mann, a former Green Beret based in Iraq, has said that while it is necessary to “clear” Daesh from Fallujah and other strongholds, “we are using the failed counter-insurgency strategies of the last 15 years, which actually will make things worse”. Mann believes the Fallujah campaign will be a “short-term reprieve on Daesh violence, but will be a disaster in the long run”.

The only winner in this game is Daesh. “They have one [masterplan] — we do not,” Mann notes. “Theirs is to play up the story that the Sunni existence is in peril because of Shiites and the West. Let’s not forget that fomenting violence between Shiites and Sunnis has been part of the Daesh strategy since their Al Qaida predecessors were bombing Shiite mosques in 2006.” Daesh will exploit its key message to accelerate what Mann calls “a [terrorist] call to arms”.

Iraq can only be stabilised by diligently working with Sunni locals, aided by special ops working from the bottom up. The West needs to re-examine strategies that are outdated and are counterproductive. And it needs to take responsibility. The day former British prime minister Tony Blair and former US president George W. Bush show remorse for what they did to Iraq, is the day healing may begin. General Bednarek adds: “The tougher issue will be, ‘what’s next?’ We must have local Sunni police and our tribes of Fallujah [should] sustain the fragile security, re-establish governance and provide for the people,” he says. “The devastation of infrastructure is widespread.”

After the fall of Mosul to Daesh in 2014, I wandered through Baghdad, talking to feverish recruits of Shiite militias — fuelled up to wipe out Daesh, but in some cases also to punish the Sunnis for the crimes Saddam had committed against them.

It was not long after the fall of Mosul that I began returning to the Baghdad morgues, where I often tried to determine what direction conflicts and wars were taking. Once I had seen Shiite victims of Sunni militias. Now, one by one, the pathologist showed me Sunni victims of Shiite militias. One woman, whose brother was found tortured and killed in a nearby park, told me that when the militias came to the door to take him away, they “screamed about what we had done in Mosul”.

The woman said she had never been to Mosul. Bush, the architect of the destruction of Iraq had once said: “Iraqis will write their own history and find their own way.” But the offensive on Fallujah will not lead them down the correct path. And as the days pass and turn into years, my long, melancholic road trip through the last days of Iraq with my friend Thaier, in 2003, seems very long ago.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Janine di Giovanni is the Middle East editor of Newsweek and an international security fellow at the New America Foundation. Her account of the war in Syria, The Morning They Came For Us, is published by Bloomsbury.