Insurgency versus Iraqi government forces

By Dave Anderson:

Gary Farber at Obsidian Wings is pulling out numerous bullet points from the Wikileaks Iraq Warlogs.  One of the points concerns casualty figures that the US military attributed to insurgents and the US military's count of Iraqi government security forces casualties. 

The database records the following death counts: 66,081 civilians, 23,984 insurgents and 15,196 Iraqi security forces

There are some serious caveats with the data.  The most important is that we know the insurgent/civilian classificiation is arbitrary and seems to be biased towards a heuristic where a dead Iraqi male of military age is classified as an insurgent.  Furthermore, we know that the US military classified everyone killed in Fallujah in April and November 2004 as insurgents despite press reports of civilian casualties at clearly marked medical facilities.  Finally, the precision is a bit false as there are numerous reports of the same dead insurgent from different units.  But this is a rough estimate that should be in the ballpark as an upper boundary of insurgent fatalities. I am assuming the Iraqi security forces data is pretty close to accurate. 

On the initial glance, the people classified as insurgents by the US military traded lives at 3:2 against the Iraqi security forces.  However, the insurgents were not just fighting Iraqi security forces; they were fighting American forces as well and inflicted close to 4,000 deaths and suffered a significant number of fatalities from American and other foreign forces.  This adjustment moves the exchance rate to slightly worse than 6:5, assuming the US data is good.  Making any downwards adjustments to the data and the exchange rate of the insurgency against both US and Iraqi government forces approaches 1:1. 

As I argued in 2005, the insurgencies in Iraq were able to beat Iraqi security forces when they could engage those forces in environments where American quick reaction forces, armor, artillery, and airpower could not bail them out.  The insurgencies were trading 2:3 or better against the Iraqi government.  Counterinsurgent forces are in serious trouble when they are inflicting 2:1 casualties against the insurgent and they are in deep trouble when the kill rate favors the insurgencies. The government casualty rates decreased when the Jaish Al Mahdi (the Mahdi Army, the primary Sadrist militia) and the Sunni Arab tribal networks either stood down or flipped to take care of local problems in conjunction with increased American money and arms. 

However, the Sunni Arab tribla networks that have been renamed as Sons of Iraq or the Iraqi/Anbari Awakening are getting screwed.  Their pay is late, few jobs are being offered in the Iraqi state security apparatus or the general economy and their leadership is being pressured by the rump AQI as well as the Maliki government.

The Sunni Arab tribal elites have been able to mobilize tens of thousands of fighting age men in the Sons of Iraq program.  Most of those men were former insurgents who had survived the extremely Darwinian pressures of fighting an urban guerilla war against the US military (denying the US its maximal objectives), as well as a shadow civil war against the JAM in Baghdad and other mixed-sect cities.  These men have the ability to fight the Iraqi government security forces to a standstill if they don't have to worry about US armor and artillery in addition to ethnic cleansing by the JAM. 

This might just be yet another reason why the Sadrists are being brought inside the Maliki government as they are yet another non-state militia that has plenty of experience and capacity to fight the rest of the state's military forces to a draw if there is minimal US involvement.  Keeping both the Sunni Arabs and the Sadrists out while keeping the less capable Badr/SIIC organization in the government weakens Maliki, perhaps fatally.