Nicholas Krohley is founder and head of Front Line Advisory, a research and consulting firm based in Switzerland. The author of The Death of the Mehdi Army: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Iraq’s Most Powerful Militia, Krohley spoke to an April 5 Middle East Forum Podcast (video). The following summarizes his comments:
Whereas for the last twenty years, the Iranian regime has been unambiguous about its objectives in its conflict with America, the U.S. has “been more inclined to prevaricate.” In its fight with Iranian proxies in Iraq, the U.S. finds itself in an “indirect, sporadic, low-intensity war” with a variety of militia groups.
There are two examples of America’s “fleeting successes” in Iraq that paradoxically highlight “structural problems” in the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) “limited view” of this low-intensity conflict. Targeting “high-level, top-down” individuals mapped out in networks, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force, whether it be via economic sanctions or military action, limits U.S. options. A broader perspective would identify how militia networks “get a foothold” in Iraqi society. This perspective would include expanding demilitarized options and working with civil society “to target that root structure.”
The U.S.'s first major success in Iraq was “the surge” in 2007-2008, considered a “triumph of counterinsurgency [COIN] in theory and in practice.” It enabled the U.S. to scale back militarily and bring about a “broadly acceptable conclusion to the war.” The surge “acquired sort of a mythical status” whereby the U.S. military provided security, economic opportunity, and “robust governance” to the Iraqi people. Considered a success in “winning hearts and minds” to “pry” the people away from the Iranian-controlled Iraqi militias, the way was cleared for America’s special operations to disperse and degrade militia networks and improve security in Baghdad.
Unfortunately, the surge had a limited shelf-life, and “fast forward ... all these different networks regenerated.” Although billions of dollars were invested in Iraq, “this hearts and minds side of things was utterly ineffective.” The DOD failed to understand how Shia militias and groups like the Mahdi Army sunk roots into the population. Thus, COIN’s main premise, that engendering the loyalty of individuals among the population helps shape the outcome on the ground, was mistaken.
The Iraqi people had a lot of antipathy towards the militias, the Iraqi government, and the Americans. The people basically “hunkered down, trying to endure waves of violence.” Once the U.S. targeting campaign scaled back, Iraqi militias returned, and al-Qaeda “morphed” into ISIS. “We’ve been hacking away at the branches and limbs of these networks, terrorists, and militia organizations, but we’ve been blind to their roots, and so ultimately we were pruning them, not destroying them.”
The second example of a successful U.S. action in Iraq that highlighted DOD’s limited view was the assassination of the IRGC “linchpin” Qassem Soleimani and his counterpart in the Iraqi militia movement, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis. This was “arguably the most impactful thing the U.S. did against Iran in the last ten years,” according to the “top-down, network-centric” approach to the enemy.
Counterinsurgency’s main premise, that engendering the loyalty of individuals among the population helps shape the outcome on the ground, was mistaken.
The strike disrupted the system for a time, with some “strategic consequences ... but that by itself isn’t the end of the war.” The limited view did not account for the strike’s potential to achieve a greater return had it been followed by a campaign to engage non-militarily with Iraqi society by targeting the “social, economic, political roots of the proxies through which Iran exerts influence.” Today, Iran-backed militias in Iraq have “regrouped, they’ve reorganized, [and] they’ve rebranded.” Even without mass appeal, they now control “border crossings, Captagon [an addictive drug] flows, [and] aspects of the illicit economy.” In the face of the militias’ suppression of popular movements arising among the youth, the U.S. has been “largely absent.”
These examples in Iraq not only have implications that are broader than Iranian influence there, but they also have implications on how the U.S. perceives Iranian proxies in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon. Consider the Iranian regime itself, with reported disaffection among the masses under the ayatollahs. “The appetite for outside intervention in the Middle East is always a dubious proposition.” It will require a “robust campaign of capacity building, of encouragement of civil society ... that then in turn can evolve on its own.”
A broader approach to a military campaign “synced in” with the social, cultural, economic, and even religious mores is the “holy grail” for U.S. “inter-agency planning and military action aligning different instruments of power and influence.” This speaks to the “ethics of irregular warfare, unconventional warfare. What are we prepared to do?” The answer challenges the DOD worldview, “the kinds of capabilities that we ought to have, and the processes we ought to develop to get this deeper understanding.”
