Wheels Within Wheels

There’s a lot to take in from Douglas A. Olliphant’s analysis of the battle to retake Mosul at War on the Rocks. I’m glad, for example, that he highlights the interfactional conflicts among the Kurds:

While the Peshmerga have performed well since their retreat before ISIL in August of 2014, there are concerns that they might alter internal political boundaries by force of arms, rather than by political processes. In addition, tensions remain between the competing factions of President Masoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and those of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, dominated by the Talibani family. Most notably, the PUK accuses the KDP of stockpiling weapons for use against other Kurdish parties and being far more concerned about preserving power in the Kurdistan Regional Government than actually fighting against ISIL.

IMO characterizing the KDP and PUK as political parties is a stretch. They are actually Kurdish tribal factions, each headed by the hereditary rulers of their respective tribes, and when they aren’t turning their guns at the Turks or Iraqis they’ll be pointing them at each other. Here in the United States in particular they’re being portrayed as liberal democratic freedom fighters which I think is setting us and the Kurds up for disappointment.

And then there are the Turks. How much influence do they want to maintain in Northern Iraq? There have been some signs that they want to reclaim Mosul as part of Turkey.

And how will Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’ite Arabs treat the non-Arabs in Northern Iraq?

As in all of Iraq, the major tension in Mosul still rotates on two axes: the tensions between Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs and those between the Arab Sunni and Arab Shia. However, Mosul is further exacerbated by the presence of a wide variety of other groupings — Turkomen (both Sunni and Shia), Yezidi, Christians, Shabak, and others. The position of most of these communities has always been precarious, but ISIL’s actions exacerbated existing tensions and disrupted the prior equilibrium. Recreating a political arrangement that allows all these groups to live in peace with their neighbors while maintaining sustainable minority communities will be very difficult and perhaps impossible for some of the most devastated groups.

These minority communities have taken a one-two punch of disruption, first at the hands of ISIL in 2014 (not that their lives were perfect before), and then as political pawns between Kurdish and Arab interests in the Ninewah plain around Mosul as ISIL has been pushed back. There has already been one incident of violence between Kurdish Peshmerga and indigenous Turkomen Shia fighters. While cooler heads prevailed in that incident, the battle for Mosul could easily engage multiple flashpoints at once, leaving leaders unable to moderate the actions of their forces.

Moderation has not been the strong suit of any of the parties involved with the possible exceptions of the United States and Brits. If we attempt to stop the contending parties from killing each other, will we suddenly become unwelcome guests?