The War Nerd: Like it or not, what’s happening in Iraq right now is part of a rational process
There’s been a lot of hysterical reaction to I.S.I.S.’s big land-grab in Central Iraq over the last two weeks. But there’s some wonderful bad news—“bad” from I.S.I.S’s perspective — in the fact that all their gains have been on the very flat, dry plains of Central Iraq. The Northern pincer of their big advance, which was supposed to swing north through Tal Afar, has stalled badly.
And for that small mercy, I give wholehearted thanks to whatever god may be. Although god or gods had very little to do with it. The heroes of this story are the Pesh Merga, the very cool Kurdish militia; and topography. Bless the hills of Kurdistan! I always loved them, especially in Spring when the flowers explode over their slopes. But now those hills and the men and women of the Pesh Merga—the Middle East’s only truly gender-neutral fighting force—are the only thing saving all the terrified, dwindling minority communities of Northern Iraq from the savagery—yeah, savagery; why lie?—of a new zombie generation of Wahhabized Arab/Sunni jihadis.
What the jihadis have accomplished is grim enough, but their showoff videos of beheadings and mass executions are minor surges in what is, like it or not, a rational process: The partition of Iraq into three, rather than the previous two, ethnic/sectarian enclaves. Before I.S.I.S made its big move, Iraq was an unstable, immiscible column divided into Kurdistan and “everything else,” with “everything else” ruled by a weak Shia army.
Now the natural three-term partition is in place again, with the Sunni of the center, Saddam’s tribe, back to doing what they do best. I don’t mean to minimize the brutality of the operation, but this is a fairly bloody part of the world, and we contributed rather significantly to that blood-mush ourselves.
As long as the Sunni jihadis focus their revenge on fellow Sunni Arabs, their truly scary potential for pogroms is limited. What I truly fear, as a fond former resident of Iraqi Kurdistan, is that these creeps should break through to the North, into the hills where what’s left of Iraq’s slaughtered minorities have found a temporary haven. But so far, they’ve failed to do that at all. All their gains have come among their fellow Sunni on the Central Plains, which has muted their bloodlust somewhat. If those jerks ever got loose among the Assyrian, or Yazidi, or Turcoman, or Chaldean, or Kurdish communities hiding in the hills…well, you don’t have to guess about what would happen. They’ve said very clearly what they’d do, and they’ve done it often enough that there’s no reason to doubt their word.
So thank you, plate tectonics, for pushing up the hills along the northwestern borders. Thank you for diverting the Sunni jihadis away from the “kuffar” unbelievers whom they’d would kill with even greater enthusiasm than they show on their own.
Actually, topography has everything to do with what’s gone well or badly for I.S.I.S. in this latest push. If you know the ethnic makeup of the turf they’ve taken, their “shocking gains” don’t seem so shocking, or impressive. After all, we’re talking about a mobile force–mounted on the beloved Toyota Hilux pickup truck, favorite vehicle of every male in the Middle East—advancing over totally flat, dry ground in pursuit of a totally demoralized opponent. In that situation, any force could take a lot of country very quickly. It’s just a matter of putting your foot on the accelerator, moving unopposed on the long stretches of flat desert, then dismounting at the next crossroads town for a small, quick firefight against a few defenders who didn’t get the memo to flee. Once they’re dead, you floor it again until the next little desert town.
So this isn’t the second coming of Erwin Rommel by any means. Everything has conspired to push the Sunni advance, from the lousy opponent they’re up against to the terrain, which is a light mechanized commander’s dream.
Flat and dry is how a mechanized force commander wants his ground—and believe me, you haven’t seen flat and dry until you get to Iraq. Once you’re south of the Kurdish mountains, you’re on a dried mudflat. Iraq is much flatter than the deserts of the US, most of which get much more rain than central Iraq. No rain means little erosion, with few wadis or ravines to slow those Toyotas down. This is, after all, Mesopotamia, a land literally built by the sediment of the Euphrates and Tigris. It’s river mud, but nice and dry because very little rain falls, especially in June (average rainfall in June is 5 mm, the size of the numbers printed on an ATM card).
On ground like that, any force with good morale and enough fuel could advance as quickly as the Sunni have. It’s the Bonneville Salt Flats of insurgency, the place you go to set new speed records.
But in the North? No world records set there. In fact, I.S.I.S. seems to be bogging down badly around Kirkuk. To understand why, you need to consider both ethnography and terrain. And in fact, those two things are linked very tightly here, for some grim historical reasons. If you look at an ethnic map of Northern Iraq, you’ll notice that the minority sects and ethnic groups (those two categories tend to run together in the Middle East) are clustered north of the Central Iraqi plain, where the ground rises toward the serious mountains along the Turkish and Iranian borders....MORE
