Last Friday, the city of Ramadi – provincial capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, and symbolic seat of its Sunni population – fell to an ISIS assault.
The loss is devastating, and not only because of the city’s size or symbolic value, or because it’s another reminder that ISIS is on the march. The loss is devastating because between Ramadi and Baghdad there is only one major city, Fallujah, which has long since fallen to ISIS and has always been known as a radical hotbed.
Beyond that is the capital itself. On the Baghdad side of the provincial frontier, Iranian-backed, Shiite militias are poised to move across the line to retake Anbar.
Hard choices about halting ISIS now and building a secure, inclusive Iraq confront both the Iraqi government and the US and its allies in the region.
The Experience of Working in Anbar
My work for an international nonprofit organization first brought me to Anbar in the summer of 2007, not long after the American-led coalition had written the province off as “lost to the insurgency.” The push to retake it by combining the efforts of US forces and tribal militias (the “Sunni Awakening Movement” or Sahwa) had begun earlier that year, and by the summer had gained traction.
From that summer through the spring of 2008, I led a locally hired staff in efforts to reduce the involvement of youth in the insurgency in the area of a city called Hit, a few miles west into Anbar from Ramadi; in 2010, I returned to Anbar with a different organization, this time to Ramadi itself, as head of a project integrating internally displaced people who had fled to the Ramadi district from elsewhere in Iraq. My leadership role required understanding the politics and society of the area well enough to effect change without also creating unintended consequences.
My observations here are based in large part on my own knowledge of the region.
How ISIS Found a Beachhead in Anbar Province
ISIS' successes in Anbar province do not come out of nowhere; they come from long history of negative interactions between the Sunni and Shia of Iraq and from American and Iranian interventions.
ISIS' beachhead within Sunni-dominated Anbar – that segment of the population that either didn’t resist the extremist group or that actively facilitated its advance – has its foundations in the way the US pursued the war in Iraq from the 2003 invasion onward. The US strategy prioritized short-term stability over long-term inclusive governance, and ignored the Shiite-dominated government’s pursuit of that stability through the exclusion and repression of the Sunni minority. That was followed by the sense of betrayal among Anbar’s tribal militias and the Sahwa fighters, who had fought alongside US troops to retake Anbar from the insurgency in 2007 and 2008.
