The Iraqi ambassador to the United States on Monday called for more robust support from American officials to counter the growing terrorist threat in his country as experts questioned the apparent cooperation of the Iraqi government with U.S. adversaries.
Ambassador H.E. Lukman Faily urged U.S. officials to provide Iraqi forces with "game changers," including precision air strikes and other forms of military assistance, to repel the advances of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). The al Qaeda offshoot has seized key cities in western and northern Iraq and marched within miles of Baghdad just three years after U.S. forces withdrew from the country.
President Barack Obama has so far sent about 650 advisers to Iraq to assess the state of its security forces but has declined to take further action. Other actors in the region, including Iran and Syria, have intervened militarily in Iraq against ISIL.
Faily said the United States, Iraq, and surrounding countries share an interest in combating a terrorist group that can launch attacks both in the region and in the West.
"ISIL is a common enemy of the Iraqi people, our neighbors, the United States, and U.S. allies, and we must make a common effort to defeat them," he said at an Atlantic Council event.
However, experts at the event expressed skepticism about the purported opportunity for America to cooperate with countries such as Iran and Syria against ISIL. Iraq has also formed troubling alliances with those countries, they said.
Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former White House national security staffer in the George W. Bush administration, noted that Iran remains one of the foremost sponsors of terrorism around the world. The Islamic government has provided sophisticated missiles to Hamas in its fight against Israel as well as material support to extremist groups in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
"Iran has found it in its interests to provide limited support to those groups," Singh said. "To the U.S. it’s the opposite—ISIS is about counterterrorism."
A classified U.S. military assessment of Iraq’s security forces found that they heavily rely on Shiite militias trained and advised by Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force, the New York Times reported earlier this month. Those same militias killed American troops during the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
"For Iran, keeping the U.S. out of Iraq would be an interest which trumps their interest in defeating ISIS or stabilizing Iraq," Singh said.
Additionally, partnering with Syria against ISIL would undermine the credibility of the United States, said Frederic Hof, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former special adviser on Syria for the Obama administration.
Hof said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad previously facilitated the flow of al Qaeda operatives into Iraq during the U.S. invasion. He is now accused of committing war crimes against his own people during a three-year civil war.
Assad has also formed a tacit alliance with ISIL—which uses northern and eastern Syria as the base of its operations—to eliminate moderate rebels battling his government.
"Working with the Assad regime is not merely to work with a devil," Hof said. "It’s to work with a devil who on a good day will meet you 10 percent of the way before trying to walk back on that 10 percent."
Hof urged the United States to lead the way in training and equipping a nationalist force of rebels outside of Syria that could reenter the country and retake territory from ISIL and Assad. The Obama administration recently asked Congress for $500 million to aid the Syrian rebels, but the program will likely not begin until next year.
Attacking ISIL’s headquarters in Syria by supporting the rebels could be more effective than air strikes in Iraq, Hof said.
That strategy would require the United States to apply more pressure on Iraq, which critics say has allowed Iran to fly supplies to Assad over its airspace and train Iraqi Shiite militia fighters for the Syrian war.
Ambassador Faily denied that Iraq was openly supporting Iran and Assad.
"We have intentionally said we don’t want to get involved in our neighbors’ internal affairs," he said.
While Singh said he supported U.S. military assistance to Iraq "sooner rather than later," he argued that it should be part of a larger U.S. strategy to restore security to the region and avoid alliances that compromise U.S. values.
"A vacuum is being created into which no other external power can step in" to restore order, he said.