US Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency: The Anbar Awakening in Iraq and the Rise of Islamic State

Seminar with senior researcher Lars Erslev Andersen, Danish Institute for International Studies.

The situation in Iraq and Syria in 2015 cannot be fully understood without looking back on the war against Iraq launched by the USA and the so-called Coalition of the Willing in March 2003, as well as on the way in which the war and Iraq’s new political dynamics – local and regional – were handled in the aftermath of the invasion.

Lars Erslev Andersen

This contribution assesses the long-term political consequences of the “turn to the local” in contemporary counterinsurgency by critically interrogating the so-called “Anbar-awakening” in Iraq. Facing a steady increase in violence and insurgency in the Anbar province in Iraq 2006 despite comprehensive kinetic US military operations, the US Command in Iraq decided shifting strategy, and adopted the COIN approach that came to be known as the Surge.

Sunni Muslim communities in Anbar province were the bases for the insurgency and especially Fallujah was then seen as the center for al-Qaeda operations. The locals were squeezed between al-Qaeda insurgency groups, The Iraqi Army, Iraqi Shia militias, and US invasion forces that all transformed the cities in Anbar into battlefields. A group of Tribal leaders, The Awakening Sheikhs (Sahwat al-Anbar / Sahwa movement) offered cooperation with the US forces in fighting al-Qaeda and the new US Chief of Command David Petraeus and his adviser, the Australian colonel and anthropologist David Kilcullen, changed their strategy from “killing enemies to protecting the locals” by training local militias, providing them with logistical and intelligence support as well as weapons.

Apparently these alliances succeeded in hunting down al-Qaeda, but the Sheikhs were never included in the political process in Baghdad and the militias were refused inclusion in the Iraq Army. In 2014 many of these trained but politically marginalized locals are supporting Islamic State (IS) in Iraq.

Based on US Army documents and secondary literature, as well as Iraqi sources this contribution analyses the political context after the Surge in order to explain what went wrong with the COIN strategy ‘turning to the local’ in Iraq.

In this regard, the contribution offers an in-depth examination of the unintended political and military consequences resulting from the incorporation of local political actors into COIN operations that links the change of strategy in Iraq and fight against al-Qaeda to contemporary “rise” of IS.

Lars Erslev Andersen is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Lars Erslev Andersen’s research focuses on the history of terrorism, al-Qaida, the relationship between rebellion and terrorism, and USA's Middle East politics. He has written books and articles on philosophy, terrorism, and political order as well as on the Middle East. Presently he is writing a book on the intellectual history of terrorism.

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