We’re sending trainers back into Iraq and back to the same sprawling base at Taji where members of the Australian Army Training team-Iraq operated almost a decade ago.
This will be a joint Australian and NZ force with around 300 Aussies and the rest Kiwis who will again do their best to impart useful military skills to the Iraqi military, now in its third iteration.
This started out as Saddam’s army, defeated then disbanded by the Americans and then rebuilt at vast cost with a little bit of help from Australia. Confronted by the onslaught of Islamic State (IS) last year, many units disintegrated and the Iraqi military is now being rebuilt yet again.
There were numerous reasons for this dismal performance, which your correspondent has canvassed previously. Fundamentally it came down to crap leadership - too often the officers gapped it, leaving the hapless jundis to their fate which for many was capture by IS and a bullet to the back of the head or worse.
Now we’re back into training. Presumably the ADF still contains veterans of the last training mission in Iraq whose experience will be useful this time round.
Some years back, your correspondent visited Taji, a huge logistics base where some Australian troops instructed at the counter-insurgency academy while others taught useful skills such as weapon and machinery maintenance and bread baking.
At that time, a key attraction was the famous Taji tank park where the surplus armoured vehicles of the former Saddam army seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see.
Curiously, NZ got the jump on Australia, announcing its deployment on February 24, an entire week before Tony Abbott got around to it. Presumably, the original plan was for Abbott and NZ PM John Key to simultaneously announce this joint deployment, possibly during Abbott’s visit to Auckland on February 27 and 28.
For whatever reason, NZ got in first, leaving the Australian government in the curious position of tip-toeing around discussing a decision everyone knew was a fait accompli.
Once upon a time, most every member of a training team actually trained. Now most don’t and that’s not just the training teams.
Australia’s mission in Afghanistan is to “advise and assist” Afghan security forces, with 400 deployed forces. Just under a quarter run the headquarters at Kabul international airport. Of the other 300, around 40 do the actual mentoring at the Afghan National Army Officer Academy in Kabul and of the ANA’s 205 Corps headquarters in Kandahar.
A significant portion of the rest provide security against insider attack, a threat which will be just as real in Iraq. The government hasn’t actually spelled out the full breakdown of the Iraq mission, though it will certainly include a substantial force protection element.
Since this was NZ’s first combat deployment since departing Afghanistan in April 2013, the kiwis went into significant detail about their new mission, with useful powerpoint slides detailing just where Taji is located and how close it is to IS forces.
That’s actually pretty close, although NZ’s defence chief Lieutenant General Tim Keating was careful to point out the multiple layers of security between NZ’s finest and the IS hordes.
Of NZ’s force of up to 143, 106 will go to Taji. Of those, just 16 will be specialist trainers.
In past training missions, Australians have instructed in useful combat support skills but this time round it’s purely combat skills, including basic weapons handling, individual and unit skills, planning of operations and medical and logistics support for operations.
Again we have the Kiwis to thank for this exposition of what the new “Building Partner Capacity” mission will actually do. Tony Abbott’s statement went into no specific detail about actual training beyond the broad requirement for international forces to help train Iraqi forces to conduct effective offensives operations against Daesh.
The long media conference attended by the PM, Defence Minister Kevin Andrews and Defence Force chief Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin didn’t add a great deal more.
What Australian troops will be doing is instructing Iraqi soldiers in infantry and small unit skills with a strong focus on fighting in urban terrain for the meat grinder that will be the battle to retake Mosul.
This will be the big one, likely the cataclysmic battle of the IS war, pitting Iraqi regular infantry and assorted Sunni, Shia and Kurdish Peshmerga militia against IS forces well entrenched inside Iraq’s second city with its population of 1.8 million people.
For brutal urban warfare, this could easily top the two battles of Fallujah in 2004 which ended with the city mostly destroyed. Maybe IS will do the right thing and abandon the city, acknowledging that to fight would inflict boundless suffering on the population. Or maybe IS would stand and fight but allow the populace to flee. How likely is either course of action? Not very.
IS well knows its advantage lies inside built-up areas with lots of people around. Out in the open it will be obliterated by coalition air power.
The timing for the retaking of Mosul remains open - various reports suggest any time from April to some time in 2016. The Iraqi government is very keen on the international training mission, suggesting it sees plenty of time for training.
In this job, Australian and NZ aren’t alone. The Americans with 3,000 troops in Iraq are training at the Al Asad air base in Anbar province. Spain and Germany are also deploying trainers.
Retired Major General Jim Molan, chief of coalition operations in Iraq in 2004-05, reckons Iraq will need around 10 brigades each of 2,500 trained troops in order to go on the offensive.
This training is a job for conventional troops rather than the group drawn from 2nd Commando Regiment who have been advising and assisting the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service since deploying into Iraq late last year.
Most will come out in September at the end of their 12-months deployment. The PM says a few special forces will remain to keep Australia informed and to have a say in the planning.
This article first appeared in Australian Defence Magazine VOL.23 No.4, April 2015