Historic proportions of Iraq’s military collapse raise questions about Iraq’s viability

In the Iraqi army, soldiers are often ordered to organize “fund raising campaigns” to buy expensive presents – cars, expensive furniture — for their commanding officers.

One of the most prevalent practices which has seriously undermined the Iraqi army may be described as “ghosting.” Commanders often list soldiers and officers in their units who have been allowed not to show up for duty – but the money for salaries for these ghost soldiers continue to be sent to the unit. These ghost soldiers do exist — they have an identity card and an address – but they are freed by their commanders from military duties, and in return they have to pay part of their salaries, sometimes more than half, to their commanders.

Haaretz notes that this why we should treat with suspicion claims that the Iraqi army is 400,000 strong, or that the number of Iraqi soldiers who were positioned in the areas now controlled by ISIS was 50,000-60,000. In addition to the fact that the Iraqi army is an army only part of which is trained, and in which a large number of soldiers do not even show up for duty, there is another problem: most of the soldiers and officers are not subordinate to their commanders — but rather to their political, ethnic, and religious leaders.

Following the collapse of the Iraqi military in the north, al-Maliki has fired forty-nine senior officers, but Maliki’s record of running the Iraqi army makes it unclear whether these dismissals were punishment for dereliction of duty or, which is more likely, part of an on-going campaign to purge the army of officers Maliki views as not sufficiently loyal to him.

Limited options
The exceedingly low quality of the Iraqi military, and the culture of corruptions which dominates its ranks from top to bottom, raise questions about the utility of military assistance to Iraq by other nations. After ten years of intensive training by thousands of U.S. officers and instructors, the structures do not exist to absorb, and make meaningful use of, even more advanced military equipment from Western powers.

If ISIS pushes further south from its current positions it will be met with stiffer opposition since it will be operating in largely Shi’a areas. Similarly, taking a city the size of Baghdad, most of whose resident are now Shi’a – under Maliki, most of the city’s Sunny resident have left – would probably be beyond ISIS capabilities, especially as Iran has already sent 2,000 troops to help in the protection of Baghdad. Even more importantly, the responsibility for the city’s protection has now been assumed by Iranian officers, who have replaced the incompetent and corrupt Iraqi officers appointed by Maliki.

Still, even if Baghdad and Iraq’s south are, at least for now, safe from ISIS incursions, the total collapse of the Iraqi army in the face of about 8,000 ISIS fighters confirmed the worst-case scenarios developed in various war games about the risks Iraq would face after the United States withdrew its troops. These scenarios included the fall of Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the militants’ capture of several border crossings with Syria.

“The momentum is with ISIS,” one Western official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told the Times. “They grow and grow every day.”

Analysts who are not government officials, and as a result have more freedom to express their views, say that there is no point mincing words: the Iraqi Army is a defeated force, a poignant proof of how the animating rationale behind the George W. Bush administration’s ambitious Iraq project, and the hopes of the American trainers of the Iraqi military in 2011, when the United States withdrew, were not much more than wishful thinking.

“The scale of Iraq’s military collapse is of historic proportions,” Michael Knights, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote recently, noting that 60 out of 243 Iraqi Army combat battalions “cannot be accounted for, and all of their equipment is lost” (“Unity With Kurdistan Will Stave Off the Threat,” New York Times, 15 June 2014).

American military officials said an evaluation of the state of Iraq’s military revealed that five of the Iraqi Army’s fourteen divisions were “combat ineffective,” including the two that were overrun in Mosul. Tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers left their gear behind and fled in the face of ISIS advances, and Iraq said it would try to create new military units from the remnants of the old units.

“It will be a mammoth task to put these units back together and rearm them,” Knights said. “Just as important, the defeated army needs to be turned around.”

The Times notes that a measure of the desperate straits in which the Iraqi military now finds itself is the fact that it – and the Iranian commanders now planning Baghdad’s defense – now must rely on assistance from hundreds of thousands of Shi’a volunteers and a smaller number of highly trained members of Iranian-supported Shi’a militias.

American military analysts noted that for army units to add volunteers who have little or no experience is of questionable benefit.

Iraq’s air force consists of only three Cessna aircraft capable of delivering American-made Hellfire missiles, but one of the Cessnas has been grounded for a while, and the military is running out of missiles.

American officials say Iraq’s counterterrorism force, which the United States has been training at the Baghdad airport, are of better quality, but that since the United States withdrew from Iraq in 2011, the skills of Iraqi forces have declined.

Analysts note that the Iraqi military is not well-practiced in fighting and maneuvering on the battlefield, and instead is now mostly a “checkpoint army,” that is, a force capable of performing low-level police tasks such as checking identification but incapable of taking the fight to the enemy.