Your Country Needs You: Iraq’s Faltering Military Recruitment Campaign

Your Country Needs You: Iraq’s Faltering Military Recruitment Campaign
Posted by: Renad Mansour Wednesday, July 22, 2015 |
 http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=60810&mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRons6TKZKXonjHpfsX57uQsW6Sg38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YIITsp0aPyQAgobGp5I5FEIQ7XYTLB2t60MWA%3D%3D
 
The Iraqi war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State cannot be won with military means alone, nor can it be won without an armed force able to roll back the salafi-jihadist group as a prelude to reunifying the country. However, the Iraqi state’s institutional deficiencies and severe sectarian polarization have impeded these efforts, weakening the force that would be best suited to play this role: the official Iraqi Armed Forces.

In the summer of 2014, several Iraqi army divisions collapsed as the Islamic State captured Mosul. In response, the government launched a national recruitment campaign that seeks to enroll paid volunteers as career officers. The reason that the Iraqi military relies on volunteer recruits (mutatawi’een) rather than instituting a draft is partly related to the traumatic legacy of conscription policies under the 1979 to 2003 dictatorship of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It would also be difficult to enforce a draft across Iraqi territory, given the divided state of the country. Nevertheless, the result is that even though tens of thousands of Iraqis are eager to take up arms against the Islamic State, the official military has failed to meet its recruitment needs. Instead, volunteers prefer to join non-state armed groups like those gathered in the Popular Mobilization Forces, known in Arabic as al-Hashd al-Shaabi, or various tribal militias, commonly referred to as Abna al-Ashair, or sons of the tribes.