When an army of 30,000 well-equipped soldiers is chased out of prepared positions in and around a major city by 800 lightly-armed terrorists, some big questions need to be asked. The fall of Mosul to Daesh (self-proclaimed IS) thugs in June last year was indeed an astonishing disaster. People, not least the Americans who thought that during their occupation they had trained the Iraqi army to a high standard, could not believe that such a defeat could come about. It might have been expected that shamefaced members of the Iraqi government and military would have resigned en masse after such an humiliation. But not a bit of it. The then prime minister Nouri Al-Maliki blamed everyone except himself. This was only the latest, though perhaps most egregious, failure of his corrupt and incompetent government, but Maliki denied he had anything to do with it. Yet he and his insidious Iranian advisers had everything to do with the Mosul catastrophe. His Shia-dominated government had pressed ahead with the marginalization of its Kurdish and Sunni members. In the armed forces, good Sunni officers were robbed of promotion and deployed to areas away from the front with the terrorists. Middle- and senior-ranking officers were nearly all Shia, which need not have been a bad thing, except that frequently they were appointed not for their abilities, but for their loyalty to Maliki and his people. Of even greater importance, the cadre of non-commissioned officers, the leaders to whom troops turn for orders in the immediate heat of battle and on whom US trainers had placed much stress, had been allowed to decay. With no officers to keep them in order, NCOs used their position as sinecures to laze about and look to their own comfort. There was insufficient attention to daily drill and discipline. One soldier who joined the ignominious Mosul rout later said that he had not had a single live-firing practice since he had gone through basic training. Any army that is so badly led, that lacks an "esprit de corps" and is bored and undermotivated is heading for disaster. And Mosul demonstrated just how great a disaster was brought about by the complacent political leadership of Maliki and his venal cronies. The ousted and discredited premier is now dismissing the scathing findings of a parliamentary report into the Mosul debacle as a “conspiracy". He continues to blame everyone but himself and now includes the Turks as being partly responsible for the city's fall. Given that terrorists had only the day before seized 24 Turkish truck drivers and abducted 49 Turkish diplomats from their country's consulate in the city, this accusation seems ridiculous. Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, who last week deprived his predecessor of his vice-presidential role, is supposed to be on a drive to clean up Iraq's corrupt politics and bureaucracy. The parliamentary Mosul report, which has yet to be published, has clearly reached some damning conclusions. It may well lead to the prosecution of Maliki and his placemen commanders and local administrators for criminal negligence. Even though such a trial will be fraught with political and procedural complications, it could mark a watershed in the campaign to clean up Iraqi politics. All Iraqis need to believe that they are being led and protected by politicians and generals who put the future of the country before their own narrow and corrupt factional interests.
