Tide ‘starting to turn’ against Islamic State as Iraq signals policy shift

The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Martin Dempsey, has said the battle against Islamic State in Iraq is "starting to turn" as Iraqi forces appear to be lifting the militants' months-long siege on the country's main oil refinery at Baiji.

Speaking in Baghdad, the general said US air action has helped Iraqi and Kurdish fighters “pull Iraq back from the precipice”. However, he warned that defeating Islamic State could take “several years” and would depend on the inclusion of alienated Sunnis in the Shia fundamentalist-dominated government and armed forces.

Refusal to supply arms

So far the government has refused to provide arms to Sunni tribesmen battling Islamic State in the west and centre of the country, making it all the more difficult to persuade Sunnis to join the fight against the militants.

However, prime minister Haider al-Abadi has taken two cautious steps to distance himself from his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki, whose policies are said to have paved the way for Islamic State’s occupation of 40 per cent of Iraq’s territory.

Although he is a member of Maliki’s Islamic Dawa Party, Abadi has dismissed 26 army officers and sent 10 into retirement in an anti-corruption drive, and appointed 18 commanders to new defence ministry posts. During eight years in office, Maliki made the armed forces a tool for advancing a sectarian Shia agenda and appointed loyalists to senior positions.

Army units were used as death squads and for rounding up and imprisoning dissident Sunnis. Posts were sold for tens of thousands of dollars and officers claimed salaries and upkeep for “ghost soldiers” whose names were on registers but did not exist.

Mismanagement and sectarianism undermined the morale of the army and security forces, who had been trained by a US that went along with Maliki’s practices until its forces pulled out at the end of 2011.

Officers changed sides

Professional officers who had served under ousted president Saddam Hussein or who had bolstered US forces in the campaign against al-Qaeda during 2007-08 were excluded, prompting them to join Islamic State, which seized control of Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and swept into Sunni areas in June.

Abadi has also reached an agreement with the Kurdish autonomous region, which would send about half the oil pumped in the Kurdish region to Baghdad in exchange for resumed funding from the federal budget for the salaries of Kurdish civil servants and peshmerga militia fighters. Baghdad had halted payments after the Kurds began exporting oil independently through Turkey.

This deal has ended the rift between Baghdad and Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, and led the Kurds to drop threats of an independence referendum. The Kurds had been angered by Maliki’s refusal to cede any of Baghdad’s authority over oil exploitation in the Kurdish region. His removal restored relations between Baghdad and Irbil at a time when peshmerga forces have been playing a major role against Islamic State. About one-sixth of Iraq’s 30 million population are Kurds.