That we have personnel and forces in Iraq isn't entirely new news, but we now have a lot more information about the "dirty wars" than we had before. And this situation is really complicated, for a few reasons.
CIA Ramps Up Role in Iraq
WASHINGTON—The Central Intelligence Agency is ramping up support to elite Iraqi antiterrorism units to better fight al Qaeda affiliates, amid alarm in Washington about spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria, according to U.S. officials.
The stepped-up mission expands a covert U.S. presence on the edges of the two-year-old Syrian conflict, at a time of American concerns about the growing power of extremists in the Syrian rebellion.
Al Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist network's affiliate in the country, has close ties to Syria-based Jabhat al Nusra, also known as the Nusra Front, an opposition militant group that has attacked government installations and controls territory in northern Syria. The State Department placed al Nusra on its list of foreign terror organizations in December, calling the group an alias for al Qaeda in Iraq.
In a series of secret decisions from 2011 to late 2012, the White House directed the CIA to provide support to Iraq's Counterterrorism Service, or CTS, a force that reports directly to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, officials said.
Iraqi and Afghan paramilitary partnered with U.S. Special Forces
There are a lot of questions.
First, the article says:
"For years, U.S. special-operations forces worked with CTS against al Qaeda in Iraq. "
Are they talking about the same Iraqi paramilitary forces that the Guardian has been reporting on in their recent blockbuster investigative articles and documentary? It does sound like the same kind of Petraeus initiated alliance and it sounds similar to the arrangement in Afghanistan. Karzai just ordered our Special Forces to leave the Wardak province by Monday, March 12.
ArmyTimes.
Angry Afghan villagers want U.S. spec ops out
MAIDAN SHAHR, Afghanistan — An Afghan policeman gunned down two U.S. special operations forces on Monday in Wardak province, less than 24 hours after President Hamid Karzai’s deadline expired for them to leave the area where residents have grown increasingly hostile toward the Americans.
Despite Karzai’s orders, the American special operations forces remain in the province where dozens of villagers accuse the Americans and their Afghan partners of intimidation through unprovoked beatings, mass arrests and forced detentions. The shootout, which also killed two Afghan policemen, only deepens the distrust.
[...]
On Monday, an Afghan policeman stood up in the back of a pickup truck, grabbed a machine gun and started firing at U.S. special forces and other Afghan policemen at a police compound in Wardak’s Jalrez district [...] Two U.S. special operations forces and two Afghan policemen were killed [...] It is unclear whether the assailant was targeting the Afghan policemen along with the U.S. special operations forces [...]
The Afghan police they are referring to are more paramilitary than police. As part of the Petraeus COIN strategy, they are teamed up with US Special Forces and they have been accused of torture, raids and abuse. They are sometimes referred to as the Afghan local police, ALP, and they are an entirely different entity than the Afghan military forces.
Guardian documentary
In Iraq, during the height of the war, there was a similar arrangement, according to the recent Guardian story.
A 15-month investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic reveals how retired US colonel James Steele, a veteran of American proxy wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, played a key role in training and overseeing US-funded special police commandos who ran a network of torture centres in Iraq. Another special forces veteran, Colonel James Coffman, worked with Steele and reported directly to General David Petraeus, who had been sent into Iraq to organise the Iraqi security services.
James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - Trailer
James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq - Full Documentary
Revealed: Pentagon's link to Iraqi torture centres
Exclusive: General David Petraeus and 'dirty wars' veteran behind commando units implicated in detainee abuse
The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the "dirty wars" in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country's descent into full-scale civil war.
Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.
[...]
"Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts."
[...]
The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador's security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.
al Nusra
Third, the article says that this ramped up CIA effort will:
complement other U.S. efforts to counter al Nusra
Just before the Brennan confirmation, we were told that there was a strong desire to shift the CIA away from paramilitary activity and back to human intelligence activities.
John Brennan, Obama's CIA Chief Nominee, Could Restrain the Agency
Al Nusra -- this is complicated. We are told that this is an al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization. But they have been receiving a lot of support in their efforts to overthrow Assad, and my understanding is that the support was coming from some of our allies in the Gulf states. Some reporting just talks about Syrian militias as if they are one coalition, part of the Free Syrian Army, united in their cause to take down Assad. But this is not the case. al Nusra is entirely different from the native Syrian militias/rebels.
Iraq accuses Qatar of financing jihadi groups in Syria
Iraq's national security advisor, Faleh al-Fayyad, said Monday that Qatar and other Arab countries, along with nongovernmental groups, are financing Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian jihadi group, with the acquiescence of Turkey.
[...]
Fayyad said his meeting with Biden was "very beneficial and useful." Iraq is hoping to bolster its relations with the United States, including via increased weapons sales and training, and attract greater investment from U.S. companies. The delegation is using this week's meetings to get acquainted with the Obama administration's second-term team.
Fayyad said that Turkey, Qatar, and other Arab countries had pushed the uprising in Syria, soon to enter its third year, toward armed conflict.
[...]
Fayyad said that Iraq is willing to cooperate with the international community to find a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria, but warned that Iraq would be less willing to do so if it is not included in the discussions and that it would not tolerate a government that included jihadi groups like Jabhat al-Nusra.
Moon of Alabama reports that the attempt to funnel weapons to specific Syrian militia groups has not been working.
Syria: The Battle Is Still In Balance
The Islamist Syrian insurgent group that had kidnapped some Philippine UN peacekeepers and is also responsible for murdering a number of captured Syrian army soldiers has evidently received modern weapons through the U.S. led additional arming of the insurgency.
That such a group received such weaponry is proof that the plan to deliver weapons only to non-radical groups is not working at all. The myriad of militant groups and criminal gangs fighting in Syria are only gradually distinguishable in their sectarian mindset.
A large amount of weapons reached the insurgents through 75 planeloads from Croatia. These were delivered through Jordan and Turkey where British, French and U.S. forces train more insurgents. The British government, in breaking the EU embargo on weapons delivery to any side in Syria, has reportedly delivered another batch of weapons from its own stock.
In the past week or so, a lot more information has been revealed. I have to say that with so much focus on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, I am really surprised to see news of any kind of "ramping up" of U.S. personnel in Iraq and the parallels with the kinds of partnerships described in the Guardian investigative piece are really troubling. That being said, Hagel is no Rumsfeld, and Pres. Obama seems to have no desire to get involved in a quagmire again. Syria looks like just such a complicated quagmire, with the additional complications of being a proxy war. Blowback from the "liberation" of weapons caches in Libya finding their way to Syria have further complicated matters for months now. It's hard to imagine how this whole situation could get more complicated. I hope they know what they are doing. Twelve years of war in the Middle East was not enough?