Iraqi police officers and soldiers who fled Mosul after being abandoned by their commanders (photo: Andrea Bruce/New York Times).ERBIL, Iraq — Gov. Atheel al-Nujaifi wants his province back.
Since early June, when jihadist militants swept into Nineveh Province in northern Iraq and seized control of its capital, Mosul, Mr. Nujaifi has been a man without a home.
As Iraqi forces and various militias, backed by American airstrikes, have sought to beat back fighters calling themselves the Islamic State, Mr. Nujaifi has pursued his own military response, narrowly tailored toward reclaiming Mosul. He is trying to assemble a 3,000-person militia of mostly Sunni Muslims from Nineveh Province to deploy against the militant group, also known as ISIS.
“We want to give a new image to the people: that Mosul will fight ISIS with people mainly from Mosul,” he said. “The people will not accept a return of the Iraqi Army.”
There are countless hurdles to this project, not least of which is that the central government in Baghdad is not likely to approve it. But however quixotic, the plan dovetails conceptually with a new national security strategy, announced by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi last week, to create national guard forces under the authority of the nation’s provincial governors.
Both Mr. Nujaifi’s hope to gin up a private militia and the government’s plan for a national guard, which Mr. Nujaifi ardently supports, emerge from the same conviction: that the best way to fight insurgencies is with homegrown troops.
The strategy is an acknowledgment of the failure of the Shiite-dominated national security forces to operate effectively and fairly in Sunni regions. Abuses committed by the Iraqi Army and police forces under the last prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki — including the arrests of Sunni leaders, sometimes on unfounded charges, and the unlawful mass detentions of young Sunni men — alienated the Sunni population and promoted antigovernment rebellion.
The national guard plan also seems to point to a greater redistribution of authority to the provinces, an issue that has polarized Iraqi officials, although some have embraced it as a possible way to keep the country from permanently fracturing.
In presenting the concept during his first cabinet meeting last week, Mr. Abadi offered few details. But officials said in interviews that the strategy, while inchoate, was a priority for the Abadi administration in its fight against the militants.
In Baghdad last week, Secretary of State John Kerry promised “technical advice and assistance” in support of the initiative.
Iraqi officials hope that legislation to authorize the national guard plan will be passed in the next few weeks, and that the units will start taking shape in the next couple of months.
The units would fall under the command of provincial governors and take the lead in provincial security matters, though they would operate in coordination with the national security forces, officials said. The units would be funded jointly by the provinces and the central government, said Saad Maan, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Continue reading the main story The national military would be principally responsible for the defense of the nation’s borders, “not to be used as a tool for settling political differences,” said Hoshyar Zebari, the deputy prime minister and former foreign minister.
But the plan is fraught with challenges and risks, and many Iraqis are dubious that it will succeed.
Some officials are concerned that the guard program would further complicate Iraq’s security apparatus, perhaps creating private sectarian militias for governors.
“There will be too many decision-making centers, and that will create a status of chaos in the country,” said Hamid al-Mutlaq, a Sunni politician from Anbar Province and a member of the Iraqi Parliament’s security and defense committee.
Mr. Mutlaq argued that instead of creating a new military arm, Baghdad should strengthen the existing armed forces by diversifying their leadership and ranks with more Sunnis and other minorities.
“Why not establish two new brigades in Anbar, two in Salahuddin, two in Mosul, with people from the area?” he asked. “And bring back a balance in the leadership of the army.”
Mr. Mutlaq added, “There should be a focus on correcting the track of the army and the police.”
The relationship between the national guard and the pesh merga, the security forces for the autonomous Kurdistan region in northern Iraq, remains undefined. Mr. Maan, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said the pesh merga would be moved “under the umbrella” of the Defense Ministry and funded by the ministry’s budget.
But while Kurdish leaders have sought financial support for the pesh merga from the central government, they are likely to oppose any suggestion that the force be incorporated into the national guard system, officials said.
The status of the Shiite militias is also unclear. The plan calls for national guard units in the country’s Shiite-dominated provinces as well as Sunni-dominated ones. But the Abadi administration has not yet signaled whether it will allow the Shiite militias to persist as separate groups, or whether they will somehow be incorporated into the national guard structure.
Mr. Maan said a decision had not been made on whether to maintain, integrate or disband the militias. Recruits, he said, would be received “as individuals, not as a group.”
But perhaps the greatest uncertainty is whether the promises of the plan can overcome the disaffection and mistrust among Sunnis.
The plan is reminiscent of a strategy used to suppress Al Qaeda in the mid-2000s, when American and Iraqi leaders cleaved off the more moderate Sunni tribes from the insurgency and paid and armed them to fight alongside American and Iraqi troops. The tribal units, known collectively as the Sunni Awakening, were critical in helping to undermine the insurgency.
Yet the Sunnis’ contributions did not translate into political power as they had hoped, and the Maliki administration failed to incorporate them into the regular armed forces or to give them government jobs as they had been promised, leaving them embittered. When ISIS fighters roared into Sunni-dominated areas of western and northern Iraq this year, some Sunni tribes cooperated with them.
Some Sunni officials said that a precondition for Sunni participation in the national guard units would be a written contract guaranteeing the terms under which fighters would enlist.
Alaa Makki, a former member of Parliament, said he had been meeting in recent months with former military officers who served under Saddam Hussein to discuss their willingness to fight ISIS alongside national Iraqi forces. Many of these officers participated in the Sunni insurgency that bedeviled American troops and their allies in the mid-2000s.
According to Mr. Makki, the officers told him they would participate provided that they be accorded the same rights as ordinary officers in the Iraqi security forces, that their military ranks be restored (some of them were generals), and that their families be entitled to a pension should they die in action.
“They lived from 2003 until now marginalized, and a high percentage of them have been assassinated,” Mr. Makki said. “But still they are ready to be loyal to Iraq and be loyal to their provinces.”
“They want to fight,” he added. “But they want guarantees.”
