War In The Age of Trump. Patrick Cockburn
now stand at about $400 million a month; expenditure is $1.1 billion, so few of the 740,000 government employees are being paid. In desperation, the government has seized money from the banks. “My mother went to her bank where she thought she had $20,000,” Nazdar Ibrahim, an economist at Salahaddin University in Erbil, told me. “They said: ‘We don’t have your money because the government has taken it.’ Nobody is putting money in the banks and it is destroying the banking system.”
The KRG promoted itself as a “different Iraq,” and so, in some respects, it is: it’s much safer to live in than Baghdad or Basra. Though Mosul isn’t far away, there have been few bomb attacks or kidnappings in Iraqi Kurdistan compared to elsewhere in the country. But the KRG is an oil state that depends wholly on oil revenues. The region produces almost nothing else: even the vegetables in the markets are imported from Turkey and Iran and prices are high. Nazdar Ibrahim said that clothes she could buy in Turkey for ten dollars cost three times as much at home; Iraqi Kurdistan, she suggested, was as expensive to live in as Norway or Switzerland. The KRG’s president, Masoud Barzani, has declared he will hold a referendum on Kurdish independence, but this is not an attractive option at a time of general economic ruin. Asos Hardi, the editor of a newspaper in Sulaymaniyah, says protests are spreading and, in any case, “even at the height of the boom there was popular anger at the clientism and corruption.” The Iraqi Kurdish state—far from becoming more independent—is being forced to look to outside powers, including Baghdad, to save it from further economic collapse.
Similar things are happening elsewhere in the region: people who have been smuggled out of Mosul say that the caliphate is buckling under military and economic pressure. Its enemies have captured Sinjar, Ramadi, and Tikrit in Iraq and the YPG and the Syrian army are driving it back in Syria and are closing in on Raqqa. The ground forces attacking Isis—the YPG, the Syrian army, Iraqi armed forces, and Peshmerga—are all short of manpower (in the struggle for Ramadi, the Iraqi military assault force numbered only 500 men), but they can call in devastating air strikes on any Isis position. Since it was defeated at Kobani, Isis has avoided set-piece battles and has not fought to the last man to defend any of its cities, though it has considered doing so in Raqqa and Mosul. The Pentagon, the Iraqi government, and the Kurds exaggerate the extent of their victories over Isis, but it is taking heavy losses and is isolated from the outside world with the loss of its last link to Turkey. The administrative and economic infrastructure of the caliphate is beginning to break under the strain of bombing and blockade. This is the impression given by people who left Mosul in early February and took refuge in Rojava.
Their journey wasn’t easy since Isis prohibits people from leaving the caliphate—it doesn’t want a mass exodus. Those who have got out report that Isis is becoming more violent in enforcing fatwas and religious regulations. Ahmad, a thirty-five-year-old trader from the al-Zuhour district of Mosul, where he owns a small shop, reported that “if somebody is caught who has shaved off his beard, he is given thirty lashes, while last year they would just arrest him for a few hours.” The treatment of women in particular has got worse: “Isis insists on women wearing veils, socks, gloves, and loose or baggy clothes and, if she does not, the man with her will be lashed.” Ahmad also said that living conditions have deteriorated sharply and the actions of Isis officials become more arbitrary: “They take food without paying and confiscated much of my stock under the pretence of supporting Isis militiamen. Everything is expensive and the stores are half-empty. The markets were crowded a year ago, but not for the last ten months because so many people have fled and those that have stayed are unemployed. There has been no mains electricity for seven months and everybody depends on private generators, which run on locally refined fuel. This is available everywhere but is expensive and of such poor quality that it works only for generators and not for cars—and the generators often break down. There is a shortage of drinking water.” “Every ten days, we have water for two hours,” Ahmad said. “The water we get from the tap is not clean, but we have to drink it.” There is no mobile phone network and the internet is available only in internet cafés that are closely monitored by the authorities for sedition. There are signs of growing criminality and corruption, though this may mainly be evidence that Isis is in desperate need of money. When Ahmad decided to flee, he contacted one of many smugglers operating in the area between Mosul and the Syrian frontier. He said the cost for each individual smuggled into Rojava is between $400 and $500. “Many of the smugglers are Isis men,” he said, but he didn’t know whether the organisation’s leaders knew what was happening. They certainly know that there are increasing complaints about living conditions because they have cited a hadith, a saying of the Prophet, against such complaints. Those who violate the hadith are arrested and sent for re-education. Ahmad’s conclusion: “Dictators become very violent when they sense that their end is close.”
How accurate is Ahmad’s prediction that the caliphate is entering its final days? It is certainly weakening, but this is largely because the war has been internationalised since 2014 by US and Russian military intervention. Local and regional powers count for less than they did. The Iraqi and Syrian armies, the YPG, and the Peshmerga can win victories over Isis thanks to close and massive air support. They can defeat it in battle and can probably take the cities it still rules, but none of them will be able fully to achieve their war aims without the continued backing of a great power. Once the caliphate is gone, however, the central governments in Baghdad and Damascus may grow stronger again. The Kurds wonder if they will then be at risk of losing all the gains they have made in the war against Isis.
PART I. AN ISOLATIONIST IN THE AMERICAN TRADITION
I was in Erbil in northern Iraq in November 2016, covering the start of the siege of Mosul, when Donald Trump was elected US president. I had always taken his brand of American isolationism seriously during the campaign. I saw it as a very American type of populist nationalism that his multitude of critics in the US and the rest of the world found difficult to understand. Jingoistic in tone, laudatory of US military might, bursting with furious threats towards potential enemies—and frequently allies—it was also much against foreign wars and entanglements.
This bellicose bluster was to continue for the next three years, but at the time of writing, Trump has yet to start a war, though he has teetered on the edge of one with Iran. A hostile media and foreign policy establishment in Washington alternate between denouncing Trump as a warmonger, an appeaser—or a fool. Lost in this torrent of abuse is the fact that at the core of Trump’s foreign policy is a brutal realpolitik and a realisation where power actually lies. His decision, for instance, in October 2019 to withdraw US troops from north-east Syria was a betrayal of the Syrian Kurds and was announced in a chaotic manner. But he was correct in recognising, as his critics often did not, that the US military position in this isolated corner of Syria was weak, risky, and unsustainable. In the event, thanks to push-back by the Pentagon, Republican hawks, and his own neoconservative-dominated cabinet, US troops withdrew from Syria and then half-returned in a messy compromise between different forces in Washington.
The assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani at Baghdad airport on 3 January did not denote a real change in this strategy of avoiding all-out military conflicts. Trump said that he gave the order to kill Soleimani to prevent a war and not to start one, though it could have had that effect. It could also have worked to the advantage of the government in Tehran as millions of Iranians rallied to mourn Soleimani and revile the US. But, at that very moment, Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner, killing 176 people, and lied about it for three days. The popular backlash was no longer against the US but against their own government. Lost in all this was the fact that the US had allowed Iran to fire ballistic missiles at US bases at Ain al-Asad in western Iraq and Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan and had not retaliated, a remarkable degree of restraint in the face of an undoubted act of war, masked by Trump’s belligerent rhetoric.
I had spoken to the leaders of pro-Iranian paramilitary groups in Baghdad in September 2019, and I could see that they believed that Trump would not act militarily against them or Iran. Their over-confidence stemmed from US lack of action over the previous summer, exemplified by Trump’s last-minute change of mind over launching US air strikes against Iran, after it shot down an