Iraq struggles to retake Fallujah a year after ISIL’s capture

BAGHDAD // A year after ISIL fighters captured Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar province, the country’s Shiite-led government remains incapable of mounting a major offensive to retake the city or any of the key areas still held by the group.

In January last year, Fallujah, 70 kilometres west of Baghdad, became the first major city to fall to ISIL. This was followed by a summer campaign that seized the country’s second-largest city, Mosul, and Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit, along with most of northern and western Iraq.

Iraq’s military has made a partial recovery following its collapse in the face of ISIL’s summer blitz. With the aid of US-led air strikes, it has now recaptured large areas of territory in Diyala province, north-east of Baghdad, as well as the Jurf El Sakhr region, south-west of the capital.

In November, Lieutenant General Abdul-Wahab Al Saadi — recognised as one of the best generals in the Iraqi army — led some 250 men on a 30-day campaign that liberated Beiji, a city and oil refinery north of Baghdad. But ISIL fighters have since returned to the city’s suburbs, raising fears that the group could take Beiji back.

Iraq’s slow-moving fight against ISIL has also highlighted the country’s sectarian tensions, given Iran a key role in military operations, and laid bare the country’s love-hate relationship with the United States, whose troops only withdrew from Iraq in 2011 after invading eight years before.

Sunni-Shiite tensions have gripped Iraq since the US toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and violence between the two communities peaked in 2006 and 2007, with thousands of killed in tit-for-tat attacks. The tension had eased somewhat by 2008, but exploded again when ISIL began its offensive in Anbar province in late 2013.

A call for jihad by Iraq’s top Shiite cleric following the fall of Mosul in June saw hundreds of thousands of Shiite youths signing up to fight ISIL, giving the war a distinct sectarian slant. Later, the government created a state agency to look after the affairs of the volunteers — the Popular Mobilization Authority — a sort of clearing house for all non-governmental fighters. The authority allowed Iranian-backed militias with a track record of sectarian violence and anti-American attacks to win a measure of official recognition as well as access to state funds and weapons, just like the volunteer fighters.

The prominent fighting role given to the Shiite volunteers and militiamen led to abuses like extrajudicial killings and theft that Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, publicly condemned. His appeals for discipline, however, have failed to stop the volunteers and militiamen from quietly carrying out sectarian cleansing. The groups have tried to diminish or even uproot Sunni communities in areas close to roads leading to major Shiite shrines, north and south of the capital.

Their methods include preventing Sunnis from returning to their homes in areas taken back from ISIL or applying scorched-earth tactics that leave the residents with nothing to go back to. Sunnis who stayed put and endured ISIL rule are often charged with collaborating with the extremists when their areasare retaken.

These practices have led to protests by Sunni politicians, who argue that sectarian cleansing has been carried out in Diyala province, which has a mixed population of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, as well as areas close to the major Shiite shrine in Samarra, north of Baghdad, and in areas to the south and south-west of the capital