IRAQ’S FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL
ON THE MORNING OF MAY 17, U.S. SOLDIERS file into a converted wing of the international airport in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil. The occasion is a Transfer of Authority ceremony, held whenever one group of soldiers rotates out and hands the reins to another. This one has the awkwardly forced feeling of an office party, only with enormous geopolitical stakes.
The Americans aren’t the social problem. They chat with one another as an Army brass quartet plays swing tunes. The tension rises from the Iraqis, who arrive in two distinct groups. One group—officers of the army that lost a large fraction of the country’s territory to ISIS in the jihadi group’s 2014 blitz—answers to the central government in Baghdad. The other group are Kurdish fighters, who answer to the semiautonomous regional government that was crucial to stopping ISIS’s advance. But a common enemy has not engendered mutual respect. General Sirwan Barzani, a veteran Kurdish commander, nods toward the officers in the Iraqi army, which has been criticized for its pace in retaking territory. “The best army in the world,” he says sarcastically. “Three months to liberate one village.”
Small wonder that when U.S. Colonel Scott Naumann, the commander of troops from the exiting 10th Mountain Division, begins his address, the talk is of a glorious past. Naumann compares his troops’ efforts to help Iraqi forces cross the Tigris—a key step toward loosening ISIS’s grip on the region—to the division’s legendary push toward northern Italy’s Po River in the final months of World War II. That action more than 70 years ago, Naumann says, represented “a significant transition in a campaign to defeat a brutal enemy in a faraway land.”
The campaign pushes on. The U.S. military’s role in Iraq in 2016, of course, is supposed to be nothing like it was even 10 years ago here, when more than two
