By Matt Bradley
The Iraqi forces' rout by a ragtag militia this week shocked
politicians in Baghdad and Washington, but the troops and their
American trainers have been warning for years that the Iraqi
military wasn't ready for battle.
Each side blames the other. Iraqi military officers say they
were left ill-prepared and underequipped by the departing U.S.
forces. The U.S. officers who trained them say that Iraqi troops
paid little heed to American military advice after they pulled
out.
"When we left, all of those institutions that we designed to
professionalize the Iraqi security forces left with us," said Lt.
Gen. Robert Caslen, who was in charge of training Iraqi soldiers
from September 2011 to May 2013 and is now the superintendent of
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Iraq's military is hobbled by sectarian tension and favoritism
that has eroded the chain of command, he said.
The U.S. military helped the Iraqi military parcel out positions
among its Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish divisions. But many officers
bucked the chain of command to deal directly with officers from
their own groups.
The U.S. military built training institutions and warehouses
filled with highly advanced technological equipment--all of which
the Iraqi army made little use of after U.S. troops departed, Gen.
Caslen said.
Although Iraqi officers don't dispute this, they say U.S. troops
left before modern military culture could penetrate the Iraqi
army's calcified institutions.
Iraq's Ambassador to the U.S. Lukman Faily said in an interview
on Wednesday his government is concerned Washington and other
Western governments aren't fully aware of the imminent threat posed
by the Islamist militia, called the Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham, to global security.
Iraq's government has contracted with U.S. defense manufacturers
for the delivery of 36 F-16 jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp. and
dozens of Boeing Co.'s Apache helicopters.
But their delivery to Iraq is still seen as months away, and it
could take much longer for the Iraqi military to begin using
them.
U.S. lawmakers for a time blocked the Apache sales over concerns
that the Baghdad government wasn't doing enough to stanch the flow
of Iranian arms into Syria.
But that block has since been lifted.
"What we are saying is that there needs to be a sense of
urgency," Mr. Faily said in Washington. "We now expect the U.S. to
appreciate this sense of urgency."
Iraqi soldiers say another problem is that they often travel
without food because senior officers were never properly trained in
logistics. Soldiers are starving, said some officers, and many
simply desert their ranks to search for food.
Iraq's intelligence agencies fail to communicate with troops on
the ground, said Jabar Manda, a spokesman for the Kurdish
Peshmerga, the army of the semiautonomous Kurdish region. The lack
of communication among branches has allowed militants to travel
largely unimpeded throughout the country.
"The Iraqi army is always just reacting," he said. "And their
reaction is always to withdraw: to withdraw from Fallujah, to
withdraw from Ramadi and from Qara Tepe," he said of Iraqi cities
now dominated by al Qaeda-linked fighters.
But most of all, Iraqi officers blame the Obama administration
for not following through with Iraqi orders for fighter jets and
other high-tech materiel.
"We really blame the American administration," said Gen.
Mohammed Khalaf Saied Al Dulaimi, commander of the 12th division of
the Iraqi army based in the northern city of Kirkuk.
"The Americans have really deeply disappointed us by not
supplying the Iraqi army with the weapons and support it needs to
fight terrorism."
Gen. Dulaimi, who is from Anbar province, said he assisted
military units during the fight in Anbar earlier this year. He was
shocked at the insurgents' expensive, powerful equipment and high
level of organization. If the Iraqis had air superiority, he said,
the well-armed Iraqi military could easily prevail.
Jay Solomon contributed to this article.
Write to Matt Bradley at matt.bradley@wsj.com
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