American warplanes began airstrikes
against Islamic State positions in Tikrit late Wednesday, finally
joining a stalled offensive to retake the Iraqi city as American
officials sought to seize the initiative from Iran, which had taken a
major role in directing the operation.
The
decision to directly aid the offensive was made by President Obama on
Wednesday, American officials said, and represented a significant shift
in the Iraqi campaign. For more than three weeks, the Americans had
stayed on the sideline of the battle for Tikrit because they did not
want to be in the position of aiding an essentially Iranian-led
operation — senior Iranian officials were on the scene, and allied
Shiite militias made up the bulk of the force.
Mr.
Obama approved the airstrikes after a request from Prime Minister
Haider al-Abadi on the condition that Iranian-backed Shiite militias
move aside to allow a larger role for Iraqi government counterterrorism
forces that have worked most closely with United States troops, American
officials said. Qassim Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who has been advising forces
around Tikrit, was reported on Sunday to have left the area.
The United States has struggled to maintain influence in Iraq,
even as Iran has helped direct the war on the ground against the
Islamic State. But as the struggles to take Tikrit mounted, with a small
band of Islamic State militants holding out against a combined Iraqi
force of more than 30,000 for weeks, American officials saw a chance not
only to turn the momentum against the Islamic State but to gain an edge
against the Iranians.
If the Americans did
not engage, they feared becoming marginalized by Tehran in a country
where they had spilled much blood in the last decade, the officials
said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
American
officials now hope that an American-assisted victory by Mr. Abadi and
his forces would politically bolster him and counter the view of Iranian
officials, and many Iraqi Shiites, that Iran is Iraq’s vital ally.
“Taking back Tikrit is important, but it gives us an opportunity to have
our half of the operation win this one,” one American official said.
“It’s somewhat of a gamble.”
The administration also hopes that a Tikrit
victory with American air power would ensure that it is their coalition
with Mr. Abadi’s forces, and not the faction led by Mr. Suleimani, that
then proceeds to try to recapture the larger and more pivotal city of
Mosul.
But by most accounts, such an
operation is months in the future, at least, as officials and analysts
agree the assembled force around Tikrit would be inadequate to take
Mosul. Officials are scrambling to train more Iraqi soldiers for a push
on Mosul, and especially to include more Sunni Arab forces in the
offensive. Tikrit and Mosul are heavily Sunni cities, and there are
widespread concerns that using predominantly Shiite forces in the
campaigns could lead to sectarian abuses. Further, it is not clear that
Mr. Abadi has the political strength or will to keep reining in the
militiamen or Iran’s influence, both which have powerful sway in his
Shiite political coalition.
The White House
made no comment and instead left it to the Pentagon to announce the new
airstrikes against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS
or ISIL. “These strikes are intended to destroy ISIL strongholds with
precision, thereby saving innocent Iraqi lives while minimizing
collateral damage to infrastructure,” Lt. Gen. James L. Terry, the
commanding of the Islamic State operation, said in a statement. “This
will further enable Iraqi forces under Iraqi command to maneuver and
defeat ISIL in the vicinity of Tikrit.”
Mr.
Abadi hailed the strikes in a speech broadcast on Iraqi state television
from an undisclosed location in Salahuddin Province on Wednesday night.
“The time of freedom has just been started,” he said. He continued, “We
announce today what we have promised you yesterday, that we are going
to liberate and clear each spot of our territory, and ISIS won’t have a
foothold on Iraq’s land.”
But Shiite militia
figures have criticized any outreach toward the United States. “Some of
the weaklings in the army say that we need the Americans, but we say we
do not need the Americans,” Hadi al-Ameri, the prominent leader of the
group of Shiite militias known here as popular mobilization committees,
said last week.
The battle for Tikrit, an
important city north of Baghdad in Iraq’s Sunni heartland, has powerful
resonance because its capture last year was seen as a sign of the
Islamic State’s ascendance. Complete control of Tikrit would give Iraqi
forces command of a vital cluster of road networks and would be the
first major success in rolling back last year’s lightning offensive that
brought Islamic State forces within a short drive from the capital.
The
offensive began March 2, with officials making repeated claims that the
city would be reclaimed within days. Then in recent days, officials
have said they preferred to consolidate their gains rather than risk
more civilian casualties by continuing to press their attack.
The
preponderance of the 30,000 fighters on the Iraqi side have been
members of the militias, fighting alongside Iraqi soldiers and
policemen. The Iraqi government has tried to broaden the offensive to
include more Sunnis, but the force remains largely Shiite.
At
Friday Prayer in Karbala last week, a sermon by Sheikh Abdul Mehdi
al-Karbalaee, a representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the
powerful spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, pointedly called for more
unity and better organization in the fight in Tikrit. That was widely
taken as implicit criticism of the offensive’s lack of success.
The
representative also said that fighters should refrain from flying
Shiite religious banners, suggesting that better efforts should be made
to involve Sunnis in the fight.
Last Sunday,
Mr. Ameri, the militia organizer, praised Mr. Suleimani, the Iranian
commander, for his help in Tikrit but said that he had left the area.
“Qassem Suleimani is here whenever we need him,” Mr. Ameri said at a
news conference at Camp Ashraf, a militia base north of Baghdad. “He was
giving very good advice. The battle ended now, and he returned to his
operational headquarters.”
Mr. Abadi asked
the ambassador Stuart E. Jones and Brett McGurk, the deputy special
envoy for the battle with the Islamic State, for American help with the
Tikrit offensive last week. The American side insisted that it could
help only if operations were coordinated by a joint center with the
American military in Baghdad and if there were clear targets.
The Americans wanted to work with Iraqi forces
they had helped train and insisted on “deconflicting” with the
Iranian-backed militias so they would not bomb them by mistake, American
officials said. The Shiite militias have generally been on the east
side of the Tigris River, the officials said, so it should be possible
to avoid any errors.
Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr. spoke with Mr. Abadi by telephone, and Gen. Lloyd J. Austin
III, the head of Central Command, developed a plan for strikes and
concluded that the Iraqis had met the Americans’ condition, the
officials said. Although Mr. Obama does not personally sign off on most
airstrikes in the fight with the Islamic State, he was brought this
decision for approval because it represented a more complicated shift in
policy.
American officials seemed heartened
that Mr. Abadi had made a point of calling the leaders of Saudi Arabia,
Egypt, Jordan and Turkey last weekend to reassure them that once the
Islamic State is rooted out of Tikrit, the Sunni city would be returned
to the control of its local Sunni police, not dominated by Shiite
forces.
But even the addition of American air
power did not guarantee victory. Although the Islamic State has a
relatively small force in Tikrit, American officials said they had
booby-trapped many of the houses, and an all-out raid to drive them out
could be costly.
“It’s a pretty gnarly situation for anybody going in there,” one of the officials said.
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