By Derek Henry Flood
Combating Terrorism Centre
Volume 11, Issue 08
September 2018
Abstract
Cave and tunnel complexes, which the Islamic State started constructing in the Hamrin mountain region well before the collapse of the caliphate, have become key to the group’s insurgent campaign in northern Iraq. With a new government yet to form following parliamentary elections in May 2018, there is a risk that focus in Baghdad will ebb on clearing out these mountain safe havens straddling Kirkuk, Salah ad-Din, and Diyala governorates.
Cave and tunnel complexes that the Islamic State started constructing well before the collapse of the caliphate have become a core element of the group’s asymmetric war fighting strategy. In the Hamrin mountain region, an area that straddles Diyala, Salah ad-Din, and Kirkuk governorates, the Islamic State has put considerable effort into constructing vast rural tunnel networks with weapons depots and foodstuffs well ensconced in both natural and man-made caves.1 The cave complexes, insulated with USAID tarps once intended for Iraqi internally displaced persons, are being discovered throughout this region. The caves serve as rugged redoubts from which the group wages guerilla war against the Iraqi state and its affiliated militias. As Iraqi and local ground forces supply geolocations, Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) has been carrying out airstrikes aimed at dismantling the Hamrin tunnel network along with outlying bunker positions to smash the infrastructure undergirding the insurgency.
This article is based in part on the author’s field reporting in Iraq in early 2018. Iraqi and pan-Arab news outlets have also reported on the ongoing counterinsurgency operations in the Hamrin Mountains. It is an area where al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI) in the last decade had a significant freedom of movement, even with a large U.S. troop presence in Iraq. It is now a significant safe haven for the Islamic State.
In their efforts to flush out Islamic State militants, Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and Shi`a militiamen incorporated under the Hashd al-Shaabi umbrella have been reaching the Hamrin foothills by Humvee and Toyota Hilux and then dismounting to scale higher elevations on foot while backed up by Iraqi Army helicopters. Sunni Arab tribal militias, known as Hashd al-Asha’iri, are also involved in security efforts around the Hamrin Mountains. In contrast to many Shi`a Arab fighters in Hashd al-Shaabi militias, Hashd al-Asha’iri are most often of local origin and allied to regional tribal leaders; they provide both indigenous intelligence and credibility in insurgency-affected districts of federally controlled northern governorates where fighters from the Shi`a-majority south are viewed as outsiders while also enlarging the security footprint of the ISF and the Hashd al-Shaabi. The current conflict in the greater Hamrin region is primarily a shadow war with little direct kinetic contact between opposing forces. Holding the high ground, jihadi militants have been able to retreat deeper into the hills as ISF and Hashd al-Shaabi expeditionary forces have approached at a distance from the lowlands.
Difficult Terrain
The topography of the Hamrin range, a ripple of the Greater Zagros Mountains located in western Iran, demarcates a natural boundary between northern and central Iraq. The range runs along a diagonal axis from northwest to southeast. Its northern reaches begin in the northeastern part of Tikrit district in Salah ad-Din Governorate. It then runs along the southwestern periphery of Al-Hawija and Daquq districts in Kirkuk Governorate before reaching its southern limit at Lake Hamrin in Diyala Governorate’s Khanaqin district (see Map 2). On October 7, 2017, ISF and Hashd al-Shaabi announced that they had gained control of the mountains just two days after the liberation of Hawija. Although Iraqi state and paramilitary forces may have temporarily cleared the area, militants who had been using the Hamrin for logistics as well as weapons storage and disbursement quickly remerged. Via its Amaq News Agency propaganda arm in June 2018, the Islamic State featured masked caravan members living a semi-nomadic existence in the Hamrin. A notable component of Baghdad’s interest in clearing the Hamrin of militants is its desire to open up new trade links with Tehran after Kurdish forces were pushed out of Kirkuk in October 2017. The al-Abadi government has sought to secure the Hamrin mountain region and the adjacent Lake Hamrin basin in northeastern Diyala Governorate in order to transport crude oil by truck from Kirkuk’s abundant fields to the Iranian refinery of Kermanshah via the border gate of Khanaqin. Furthermore, Iran’s petroleum minister Bijan Namdar Zangeneh stated that Tehran desires a pipeline to be constructed through this region from Kirkuk directly to Iranian territory.
The difficult-to-reach Hamrin mountain terrain is being used by Islamic State militants to train and organize attacks in nearby areas of northern Iraq. Islamic State commanders and fighters have maintained training camps along the Hamrin range to learn and maintain the skills of their jihadi recruits. Additionally, Islamic State fighters have reportedly built medical facilities in the mountains to treat their wounded. Vulnerable oil infrastructure in the fields abutting the Hamrin range is often a target of the group’s asymmetric attacks. The Islamic State employs sabotage tactics meant to inflame issues in Iraq that have remained unresolved since 2003. For example, on May 24, 2018, militants damaged power lines in the village of Barimah located north of the Bajii-Kirkuk road, which resulted in cutting off power to the Sunni Arab majority cities of Hawija and Tikrit in the midst of a heat wave. Public anger over power shortages has been further stoked by Islamic State militants sabotaging energy infrastructure in the Kirkuk-Diyala-Salah ad Din belt to further widen the rift between average Iraqis and the central government. The attack on an otherwise significant village like Barimah signifies that the Islamic State cells that sought refuge in the Qori Chai river valley northeast of the Hamrin Mountains are now regularly launching operations out of this rugged area on an assortment of vulnerable targets in Kirkuk’s under-policed hinterlands. Militants launch nighttime attacks in villages where the Federal Police presence is either minimal or nonexistent.
Digging In
The Islamic State’s construction of cave and tunnel complexes in northern Iraq began well before the demise of the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate, with many completed before that time. The Hamrin have a history as an insurgent redoubt. AQI, along with Ansar al-Sunna, and Jaish Rijal al-Tariqa al-Naqshabandiyya, used the mountains in a chaotic post-2003 Iraq in a manner analogous to the Islamic State’s current use. ISF and Hashd al-Shaabi brigades have discovered tunnels nestled deep in the mountains with generator-rigged electrical systems and makeshift water lines that they torch once they have been discovered and inspected to discourage the jihadis from returning to the area.
Accurate ground intelligence by indigenous forces in locating the tunnels that are naturally concealed by the Hamrin range’s geologic formations is vital in coordinating supporting airstrikes. As an indication of the Islamic State’s longer-term planning, in February 2018, the ISF discovered a tunnel complex 20 kilometers south of Baquba, the seat of Diyala Governorate, outfitted with refrigerators with several months’ worth of food and washing machines all powered by a hidden solar grid above ground. The meticulousness with which the tunneling is carried out and the network’s food stores and ammunition caches indicate that the Islamic State laid the groundwork to sustain a protracted guerilla war while world attention focused on the Stalingrad-like battle for Mosul to the northwest. Well before Mosul fell to the ISF, Islamic State fighters were already launching attacks from their Hamrin hideouts in Diyala and Salah ad-Din governorates.
In fact, the Islamic State’s tunneling efforts in some parts of Iraq long predated the battle for Mosul. In Diyala Governorate in particular, the Islamic State reverted to insurgency soon after its rapid territorial conquest of northern Iraq. Diyala was declared—at least publicly—entirely freed of Islamic State control by Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir al-Zaidi on January 26, 2015, after the militants had been holding territory there for approximately six months. Likely calculating that its grip there was tenuous, the Islamic State bored tunnels in the Diyala sector of the Hamrin range as it occupied towns in the Lake Hamrin basin in the second half of 2014. In May 2015, Saraya Ansar al-Aqeedah, a Shi`a militia group under the banner of Hashd al-Shaabi, posted a video to its social media of Islamic State tunnels they were discovering in Diyala only months after ISF had declared the territory liberated.
From the Mountains, a Mounting Insurgency
The tunnel and cave complexes formed part of wider preparations for the Islamic State’s insurgency. As the group was cleared at the village level—at least officially—in the governorates spanning the belt from Diyala to Ninewa connecting Iran to Syria between January 2015 and October 2017, the militants left booby-trapped homes in their wake, making numerous villages extremely perilous for returning IDPs as well as ISF not properly trained in high-risk ordinance removal. This IED-laying tactic has proven effective in making the region difficult to pacify. This security vacuum allowed the Islamic State the space to revert quickly to insurgent tactics in Diyala while it was busy establishing administrative control in Mosul and other key cities elsewhere in Iraqi lands it had seized. The strategy the Islamic State had already implemented in Diyala was replicated in northern districts of Salah ad-Din and southern districts of Kirkuk once the key towns of Shirqat and Hawija were declared freed of Islamic State control in early fall of 2017.
In many ways, Diyala has acted as an ethno-sectarian microcosm for security dynamics for the whole of Iraq. Its proximity to Baghdad, as well as the Iranian frontier, made it a priority for the al-Abadi government and Hashd al-Shaabi’s Iranian sponsors to control. Diyala was, for a time, the easternmost declared wilaya, or province, of the then-incipient caliphate project. It was the first significant area the Islamic State lost to state and sub-state forces in Iraq. Today, militants employ the Hamrin Mountains as a logistical lifeline stretching from Diyala to Kirkuk via Salah ad-Din.
In July 2018, former Iraqi Minister of Interior Baqir Jabr al-Zubeidi said that he estimated the Islamic State controlled some 75 villages in Kirkuk, Salah ad-Din, and Diyala. These areas were never entirely taken under full control by the central government after the liberation of Hawija in early October 2017. In early 2018, frontlines hardened between the Islamic State and Federal Police in a string of agricultural villages southwest of Daquq town in Kirkuk Governorate.
This past summer, vulnerable populations faced regular attacks in Kirkuk Governorate’s southern sub-districts. Religious minorities such as the Sufis and followers of the secretive syncretic Kakai faith along with local Sunni Arabs the Islamic State deems collaborators for cooperating with ISF continue to be at great risk from attacks by jihadis based in the low-slung Hamrin Mountains and the Qori Chai river valley, which begins near the tiny villages of Dabaj and Qaryat Tamur to the north of the Hamrin Mountains. The Qori Chai was described to the author as a “militant highway” whereby jihadis can traverse from the plains below the Hamrin northward to attack cities and towns in Kirkuk Governorate, which begins near the tiny villages of Dabaj and Qaryat Tamur to the north of the Hamrin Mountains.
The Islamic State has been mounting regular assaults on pro-Baghdad Sunni Arab tribal militias across Kirkuk, Diyala, and Salah ad-Din governorates. In areas like Dibis district in northern Kirkuk Governorate that had been largely secured by Peshmerga until late 2017, the Islamic State claims to be launching nighttime raids against poorly funded Hashd al-Asha’iri encampments. The Islamic State’s assaults on minorities is patterned after past AQI tactics whereby vulnerable communities in the vicinity of the Hamrin Mountains and Lake Hamrin basin perceive themselves to be insufficiently protected by ISF, and ethno-sectarian tensions are further exacerbated as a result.
A Delicate Political Environment
The ongoing religio-political violence is taking place against the backdrop of the widely disputed May 12, 2018, parliamentary election, which saw Muqtada al-Sadr’s Sairoon Alliance receive the highest vote share. Sairoon ran on a nationalist platform focused on a long hoped for anti-corruption drive and the delivery of services to ordinary Iraqis in a coalition comprised primarily of the Sadrist Movement and Hizb al-Shwiyu’i al-Iraqi (Iraqi Communist Party). Sairoon then controversially formed a post-election alliance with the pro-Tehran Fatah alliance of Hadi al-Amiri, the leader of al-Badr organization, which forms the backbone of the Hashd al-Shaabi militia.
When the al-Sadr-led Sairoon and al-Amiri’s Fatah allied themselves for a time in June 2018 as a matter of sheer pragmatism within Iraq’s fissured political spectrum, questions arose about the future of Hashd al-Shaabi. Two of Iraq’s most powerful men have starkly divergent views on the umbrella organization’s core task and purpose. This has potential implication for counterinsurgency efforts in the Hamrin Mountains given that the Hashd al-Shaabi have played a key role in these operations.
Al-Sadr espouses comparatively broader Iraqi nationalism blended with local Iraqi Shi`a identity politics while al-Amiri and other Shi`a militia leaders under Fatah have considerable fealty to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali al-Khamenei and the revolutionary ideology of Wilayat al-Faqih (‘Guardianship of Jurist’). In the months since the election, the various blocs—primarily Sairoon, Fatah, Nasr, and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition—vying for power have failed to form a new, effective coalition government.
The political turmoil extends far beyond Baghdad. In post-KRG Kirkuk, the allegations of electoral fraud were perhaps most acute. There have been demonstrations from Arab and Turkmen communities alleging irregularities and demanding a recount after the late Iraqi president Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan won the largest share of the Kirkuk vote even though Asayishf and Peshmerga forces withdrew from the city and the bulk of the governorate in mid-October 2017 following a reported deal between the Talabani family and Major General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
The ongoing political stalemate in Baghdad coupled with anti-corruption protests in Iraq’s Shi`a-majority southern governorates has already, inevitably, diverted some focus away from the Hamrin operations as forces ranging from the elite Counter Terror Service to Hashd al-Shaabi’s Badr Organization have been dispatched to Basra to protect infrastructure and disperse protestors. Lacking the same visceral, unifying existential threat the territorial caliphate once posed to Iraqi Shi`a identity, the raison d’être for some of the most prominent pro-Iranian Hashd al-Shaabi leaders has shifted from war-fighting in northern and western Iraq toward an increased focus on evolving political and economic interests. Although ISF, Hashd al-Shaabi, and Hashd al-Asha’iri brigades have continued counterinsurgency operations in the Hamrin Mountains and other contiguous districts of northern Iraq, the current febrile political environment risks deprioritizing the fight against remaining Islamic State cells in the Hamrin Mountains.
Conclusion
Political turmoil in Baghdad risks taking the focus of Iraqi political leaders away from clearing militants from the Hamrin mountain range, which has emerged as key redoubt for Islamic State fighters and a launching pad for the group’s insurgency in northern Iraq. Baghdad lacks a coherent strategy for dealing with militants hiding in the depths of the Hamrin and nearby Makhoul Mountains, the Lake Hamrin basin, and the craggy Qori Chai river valley northeast of the Hamrin Mountains. It is in these remote areas and this difficult terrain that the jihadis have survived to fight another day in a battlespace far less familiar to their opponents. As political elites in Baghdad and Najaf jockey to form a new government, the still-serving al-Abadi government’s low-intensity war is making little headway.
In a further possible distraction to tackling militants in the Hamrin Mountains, ISF and Hashd al-Shaabi are also contending with a burgeoning protest movement railing against endemic corruption and power shortages in cities across the underserved southern governorates. The stakes are high. If the Islamic State continues to strengthen its position in the Hamrin Mountains, its insurgency could spread wider across Iraq’s federally administered northern governorates.
About the author:
Derek Henry Flood is an independent security analyst with an emphasis on the Middle East and North Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia. He is a contributor to IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review and Terrorism and Security Monitor. Flood’s research for this article included travel to Kirkuk Governorate in February and March 2018. Follow @DerekHenryFlood
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