Iraq: Understanding the coup in Mosul and its consequences

In a recent speech, hours after Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, fell to radical Islamic insurgents, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that the collapse of the government forces in the city was a conspiracy. Some on social media, including myself, saw this as a continuation of the old tradition adopted by the defeated, though I had reservations about this view in the end.

Indeed, when Maliki used the terms “deception” and “coordinated rumors” to describe what had happened, I recalled immediately what the late Baathist leader Hani al-Fekaiki once revealed. Fekaiki was one of the masterminds of the military coup of February 8, 1963. In his book, the “Dens of Defeat,” he wrote, “We have toppled the regime of Abdul Karim Kassem with the weapon of rumors.” In truth, the Baath regime used psychological warfare very skillfully, as many experts assert.

Maliki’s speech was inconsistent, superficial, and betrayed his confusion. It seems that his primary goal was to increase the morale of his allies and partners in government, with no signs that he has any regrets, or that he could ever tire of the misinformation and lies of his military leaders and advisers, even when he is facing a dangerous and earthshaking military defeat.

Otherwise, in a month or two, Maliki will still be peddling the same claims, except that thousands more Iraqis will have been killed, injured, or driven out from their homes, and many more cities will have been razed to the ground, while the unity of Iraq and its people will be up in the air.

According to events on the ground, and an analysis of testimonials and news reports, we believe that two main factions took part in the attack: Douri’s Baath faction, which was in charge of planning and planting Baathist officers in the government troops leadership and preparing hundreds of fighters as part of the Naqshbandi militias, to replace the Baath’s defunct militias, and Takfiri groups like ISIS, Ansar al-Sunna, and others, who provided well-trained fighters. 

This is in addition to tribal-sectarian forces led by people like Harith al-Dhari, who gave his blessings to the coup from Amman, Ali Hatem, and clerics like Rafi Rifai and Abdul Malik al-Saadi, who have always claimed that the Iraqi army is an “occupation army” in the Western regions. 

Meanwhile, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the news website Al-Badil Al-Iraqi, the gunmen who first stormed Mosul were mostly non-Iraqis. Later on, those gunmen were replaced by Iraqi militants spotted protecting banks and public installations, while the foreign fighters moved on to other battlefronts.

The commander of Nineveh Operations Mahdi Gharrawi was able to escape a similar fate, as he had at the time been at the headquarters of one of his brigades on the outskirts of Mosul, in al-Khazer region. Kurdish parties have attempted to smear the man and forged a picture showing him with the Peshmerga militia behind him, but he succeeded in proving that he had not left his position and that he was in the process of regrouping his forces.

Of the major consequences on the medium and long terms for the Mosul coup orchestrated by Douri and his allies in the suicidal Salafi groups, we highlight the following:

Iraq is on the path to being partitioned into sectarian mini-states, or at least, the provinces of Nineveh, Tikrit, and parts of Diyala could be carved out of Iraq by force of arms. However, Anbar’s special tribal circumstances make it difficult to implement a similar plan there. Indeed, in Anbar, an Iraqi national identity remains strongly rooted, and a plan to turn the province into an autonomous region was thwarted despite all the clamoring by strong parties to this end. Hostility to Takfiri groups is strong throughout the province as well, with the exception of Fallujah perhaps, though there are local frictions that were not visible in the recent past, and which now mar relations between communities and clans in Anbar and Nineveh.

The door is now wide open to regional intervention, especially by Iran, with its sectarian calculations and concerns regarding Western belligerence, and Turkey, which has similar calculations in addition to its old ambitions in the “Province of Mosul” of the Ottoman Empire. The door is also open to Western intervention, which could take the form of a direct albeit gradual comeback by U.S. occupation forces into Iraq, or at least, the form of substantial backing for the sectarian system in a way that would ensure further dependency on the United States.

The Mosul coup has put an end to the idea of stopping or even tapering de-Baathification in the context of the Accountability and Justice law. Instead, the current government might launch a violent and comprehensive campaign against Baathists, and it will no longer be easy for democratic and left-wing voices demanding an end to or a tapering of de-Baathification – or to have it deemed a criminal rather than a political process – to restate these demands. For one thing, it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Baath’s chronic obsession with plots and coups is incurable, which will mean that thousands of innocents are set to pay the price for Douri’s folly and power hunger […].

The coup will cause the loss of the oil-rich and ethnically diverse province of Kirkuk to the Kurdistan Regional Government. The province has been practically under occupation by the Kurdish Peshmerga since June 12. Not many Sunni Arabs will rush to defend it after what happened in Mosul and Tikrit. However, the Anbar province may reach out to the provinces of the center and the south to form the nucleus of a different Iraq that would end the sectarian militia-led mini-states in Mosul and elsewhere, if the sectarian system in Baghdad falls.

On the flip side of this gloomy picture, the coup could also spell the end for the era of sectarian power-sharing and the constitution drafted by the occupation, having proven its threat to the unity of Iraq, its territorial integrity, and the wellbeing of its people. The question now is this: How can this era be practically ended, to launch the process to build an Iraq based on citizenship and equality, atop the ruins of the Iraq of sects and quotas?