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Baghdad // The run-up to the battle for Mosul, the northern Iraqi city held by ISIL since June 2014, is slow but steady. Government troops are engaged in fierce battles with the militants south of the city while US engineers are busy upgrading an airbase recaptured from the extremist group last month to serve as the main military hub for the operations.
But the months leading up to the final push for Iraq’s second largest city have laid bare some of the fractures that will haunt post-ISIL Iraq. From the growing influence of the Iranian-backed Shiite militias sanctioned by the government to the simmering tensions between Baghdad and authorities in the autonomous Kurdish region.
The battle will most likely go the government’s way given how similar campaigns have ended in Anbar province. ISIL’s stunning battlefield successes in 2014 in the vast mostly Sunni region have been rolled back with the recapture of the provincial capital Ramadi and the strategic and highly symbolic city of Fallujah.
Much to their dismay, the Shiite militias were excluded from the battle for Fallujah this summer and from entering Ramadi last year.
The origins of most of the militias are rooted in the days of the US military presence in Iraq, when they fought against American troops with the support of Iran. They grew significantly stronger, better organised and armed after the nation’s most powerful Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Al Sistani, called for jihad against ISIL as its fighters fought their way to the edges of Baghdad in June 2014.
Tens of thousands of volunteers responded to the call, swelling the ranks of the militias and winning them a valuable religious mandate as well as the financial and material support of the Shiite-led government, which has since been paying the militiamen’s wages.
The militias proved invaluable in the weeks and months that followed the meltdown suffered by the army and security forces during the ISIL blitz in 2014 across much of western and northern Iraq, protecting the capital as well as a key shrine north of Baghdad. The militias, known as the Popular Mobilization Forces, then scored a string of key battlefield successes in the province of Diyala east of Baghdad and on the southern and south-western approaches of the capital.
The Iraqi army has meanwhile regained much of its strength and proved its worth in the battles of Anbar and in Salaheddin province, where it liberated Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit and Beiji, a city that is home to a major oil refinery. To the army, and particularly its elite counterterrorism forces, the militiamen have become an annoyance, almost a liability, on account of their widespread abuses against Sunnis, their occasional collapse of discipline and the deep involvement of advisers from Hizbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard in their operations.
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