Lt Gen Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi had 225 fighters, a single Abrams tank, a pair of mortars, two artillery pieces and about 40 armored Humvees when he set out to retake a strategic city in northern Iraq captured by Islamic State militants over the summer.
It took 30 days as his force made an agonizingly slow journey for 40 kilometers (25 miles) through roadside bombs and suicide car attacks, then successfully laid siege to the oil refinery city of Beiji. The campaign earned al-Saadi the biggest battlefield victory by Iraqi forces since Islamic State fighters swept over most of northern and western Iraq in a summer blitz, prompting the collapse of the military.
Yet al-Saadi is deeply pessimistic. In a two-hour interview with The Associated Press, he said Iraq's military lacks weapons, equipment and battle-ready troops and complained that U.S. air support was erratic. Both the military and the government remain riddled with corruption, he said. Most of the senior generals serving when the military fell apart had skills "more suited to World War II," he said.
"If things don't get better," warned the general, "the country could end up divided" between its Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish populations.
The extremists are beatable when confronted with a proper force, he said. But he worries that the military's multiple woes prevent it from doing so. Already, there is a danger the jihadis could retake Beiji, he said.
A Baghdad-born Shiite with family roots in southern Iraq, al-Saadi complained of "excesses" by some of the Shiite volunteers who joined the fight against the Sunni militants and on whom the military has come to rely.
"I am a military man, and they don't respect the rules by which we operate," he said. Volunteers, for example, looted homes in government-controlled areas around the Sunni city of Tikrit and tried to intimidate army officers, he said. During his march toward Beiji, some of the volunteers whom he deployed as a rear guard left their posts.
The government and its media consistently praise the volunteers' role in the war against the Sunni militants.
The US-trained al-Saadi, who is second-in-command of the army's elite counterterrorism forces, spoke at his office in one of Saddam Hussein's Baghdad palaces. The chain-smoking general wore a baseball cap and green sweater — the same outfit he wears on the front lines, without helmet or body armor or indications of his rank. In the Beiji campaign, he was wounded by shrapnel in his arm and dangerously close to his eye, on top of wounds he suffered last summer in the western province of Anbar.
On his office walls hung photos of himself with former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Saadi said he had a close relationship with al-Maliki during his eight years in office. But the Shiite leader, he said, bears the "moral responsibility" for the debacle against the Islamic State group.
Al-Maliki stepped down in August, replaced by Haider al-Abadi, who has sought to draw Sunni support against the militants. According to al-Saadi, al-Abadi has largely left the military to run the war against the Islamic State as it sees fit. Al-Abadi has also shaken up the military, pushing aside dozens of corrupt or inefficient officers. He has also stopped payments of millions of dollars in salaries disbursed to thousands of nonexistent troops, or "ghost soldiers."
Al-Saadi is the head of military operations in Salahuddin province, where Beiji is located, and his troops were stationed in a base outside Tikrit. The Islamic State group holds Tikrit itself and most of the surrounding ground.
A veteran of Iraq's 1980-88 war against Shiite Iran, al-Saadi said he turned down offers of help from Iranian military advisers in retaking Beiji. Iran has been closely helping Iraq's government in the fight against the extremists.
