Iraq is at a crossroads between stability and instability, security and insecurity, peace and conflict. Whatever transpires, Iraq’s security sector has a critical role to play in the country’s transition in the years ahead. How well is the sector placed to ensure the evolution of Iraq as an enduringly stable, secure and prosperous sovereign state?

Mirroring Iraq’s overall turbulent situation, the country’s security sector has experienced a long period of trial and tribulation since its decimation, disintegration and recomposition following the 2003 US-led invasion of the country. Its command, reformation and effectiveness have been affected by factors ranging from a somewhat dysfunctional political system to social and cultural divisions and outside interventions in pursuit of conflicting interests.

The US toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime, but in the process also dismantled the administrative and security structures which were pivotal to holding the mosaic that was Iraq together as a functioning state. It ultimately failed to empower the Iraqi people to rebuild their lives and country and engaged in processes geared to benefit Washington’s ideological and geopolitical preferences rather than to endow Iraq with the appropriate foundations for stability and security in a very difficult neighbourhood.

The result was political, social and sectarian fragmentation, and transformation of the country from a strong state with suppressed societies to a weak state with strong societies. This opened the space for a plethora of not only domestic clusters but also outside forces to engage in power struggles to shape Iraq’s future. As US forces battled on different fronts to make their occupation worthwhile for wider regional gains, America’s arch adversary in the region, Iran, used its proximity and sectarian affinity with Iraq’s Shia majority population to back various militias in support of its broader geopolitical, sectarian and economic interests and, above all, regional security architecture.

Iraq’s security sector evolved essentially at the mercy of a dysfunctional political and national situation and outside interventionism. It suffered from internal factionalism, a lack of united command and highly qualified and experienced leaders, and widespread misuse of funds, opening it to serious challenges by outside proxy forces, such as Iranian-backed militias, and anti-systemic violent actors, such as the so-called Islamic State.

Although the US and its allies found it compelling once again to intervene and fight on the same side as Iran to defeat IS, they could do little to thwart the growth of Iran’s organic ties with Iraq. The US killing of the Iranian Quds commander, Qassem Soleimani, and his close Iraqi ally and head of the loose coalition of pro-Iranian militias known as the Popular Mobilisation Units, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, in January 2020 have done little to diminish Iranian influence.

Since IS’s defeat in 2017, the US has retained a residual force, which has now officially dwindled to 2,500 troops. But it is no match for the capacity that Iran has built in leveraging Iraqi politics and the security apparatus, although this doesn’t apply to the Iraqi autonomous Kurdistan region.

The Iraqi security sector has certainly undergone some serious reorganisation and reformation in the past few years to make it more robust and combat-capable. The US and its NATO partners have made strenuous efforts to assist Iraq in this respect. Yet, the sector still faces important but not necessarily insurmountable challenges in a number of areas, four of which are worth emphasising.

The first concerns the issue of unification, integration and loyalty. To build a highly professional security apparatus, there has to be a greater focus on alleviating the stresses and anomalies arising from internal political, social and economic settings and external interference. Personality and resource-based competition, managerial gridlocks, and misuse of resources and funding have also been highlighted as serious problems within the sector, not to mention the challenge posed by the autonomous status of Kurdistan’s regional forces.

The second relates to the presence of outside rival forces which have sought to penetrate and influence the Iraqi security sector either directly or indirectly in pursuit of competing geopolitical and ideological interests. A US–Iranian rapprochement of some nature is badly needed for these actors to retrench their rivalry and enable the Iraqi security sector to get its act together with assistance from, but not under the influence of, those outside actors that respect the right of the Iraqi people to determine their own future.

The third challenge is linked to counterterrorism. Iraq has had a larger share of anti-systemic groups than many other states in the region. The bloody rise and rule of IS until its defeat were very costly for the structural and operational capability of the Iraqi security sector. However, IS hasn’t been extinguished altogether. It continues to have sufficient ideological and operational resilience in the context of ethnic or sectarian marginalisation of one segment of the society by another in Iraq. As long as this remains the case, its impact on the capabilities of the security forces cannot be underestimated.

The fourth relates to equipment, infrastructure, training, education and research. While the Iraqi forces have enjoyed a good supply of arms and related operational tools with the help of NATO, training, education and research are another issue. Iraq’s security sector is now endowed with its own relevant educational programs and institutions, where assistance from NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme has played an important part. But it can do with more aid from, and robust interaction with, other credible and well-established sources abroad.

Iraq has experienced a very turbulent period in its history as a civilisational cradle and in its consolidation as a state since the 1920s. The country’s transition from a personalised state under Saddam to an emerging but troubled democracy has been taxing on its people and the security sector. Although a great deal has lately been accomplished in terms of reform, the security sector is far from being self-sustaining, capable of operating above politics or free of outside influences to ensure domestic order and national defence.

US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has made the US and its allies more prone to blowback and further violence in the Middle East. The president has repeatedly justified his decision to kill Qassem Soleimani by claiming that the Iranian commander posed ‘imminent threats’ to the US in the Middle East. Yet, neither members of Trump’s administration nor American intelligence officials have so far presented any tangible evidence that Soleimani was planning such attacks.

At the time of the drone attack in January, concerns were raised about the likely consequences of the killing. The assassination has, in fact, increased the threat to coalition troops, including members of the Australian Defence Force.

A closer look at how Iraq’s militia network was established and operated under Soleimani demonstrates how things have changed for the worse. Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Units, or PMU, were founded in 2014 following a fatwa issued by Iraq’s most influential Shia leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the founder and de facto leader of the PMU—also killed in the US strike—had united 50 disparate militia groups under the direct tutelage of Soleimani, who was commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The PMU’s mission was to take on the Islamic State terror group, which had conquered more than a third of Iraq by 2014.

In the recent past, much of the Western media regarded Soleimani as a hero and referred to him as a ‘legend’, the ‘Shadow Commander’ and ‘Dark Knight’. Reports described how he led the PMU’s major offensive against IS in Tikrit without US air support in March 2015. In a well-coordinated operation, Soleimani organised an army of around 30,000 Shia and Sunni fighters to retake the city.

In what is known as the second battle of Tikrit, a 9,000-strong assault force was deployed and then Sunni tribesmen were sent to pacify the city. Finally, forces were assigned to intelligence-gathering, reconstruction work, and protection of refugees and casualties.

In 2016, the Iraqi army, along with 16,000 PMU fighters and 500 American troops, defeated IS in Mosul in what Iraqi General Ghais al-Hamdawi described as a ‘superbly coordinated mission’.

Soleimani’s leadership helped the PMU achieve military objectives where the US-trained Iraqi conventional military had failed. Yet, as Iraq became more dependent on Iran-trained militias, the US and its regional allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, became increasingly concerned about Iran’s power projection in Iraq. Despite multiple instances of cooperation between coalition forces and the Iran-backed PMU in fighting IS, the US continued to blame Soleimani and his affiliated militia groups for assaults on Americans in Iraq.

With Trump’s authorisation, US forces carried out a drone strike that killed Soleimani and al-Muhandis on 3 January. This was seen by some as a ‘dangerous escalation’, which led to Iran’s direct retaliatory attacks on US bases in Iraq and galvanised an Iran-backed network of proxies into a more militant posture including further moves against coalition forces.

Iran seized the opportunity to encourage aggrieved groups to become more militant.

With the sudden change in the dynamics of the contest between Washington and Tehran, the Iran-backed militias transformed from a centralised cluster of non-state armed groups under the PMU banner into separate, flexible, smaller groups in Iraq.

Those vaguely described ‘imminent threats’ became reality after Soleimani’s death. Parts of the 140,000-strong militia force, which once worked under the PMU umbrella, have begun to form into seemingly independent groups whose connections are shrouded in secrecy. Groups such as the League of Revolutionaries (Usbat al-Thairen), Ashab al-Kahf and Qabdat al-Hoda, which are reportedly formed by members of old Iran-backed groups, have maintained a clandestine relationship with Iran under new names.

The decentralisation of PMU groups appears intended to deny the involvement of previously established militias such as Kataib Hezbollah in attacks on US forces and deflect blame from Iran. In addition to such plausible deniability, the recalibration of Iran-backed proxies has maximised the unpredictability of these groups and decreased the ability of the US to deter militant assaults in Iraq.

What used to be regarded as low-level strikes against US targets by PMU-affiliated groups have been replaced by surprise attacks by rebranded militias that are pro-Iran but don’t have clear links to Tehran. For example, a group called Saraya Thorat al-Ashrin al-Sanieh released footage of a purported attack on an American convoy in Iraq on 18 May and announced itself as a new, anti-US militia.

The same group claimed responsibility for another attack on a coalition convoy in which several trucks were burned on 12 July.

Last week another new group, calling itself Ashab al-Kahf, claimed to have attacked a US logistical convoy near Tikrit. The group appears to have targeted a column of trucks operated by Iraqi contractors.

Another group, calling itself the al-Muhandis Revenge Brigade, announced its establishment by claiming to have staged an audacious attack on an American Chinook helicopter in Iraq on 17 April. The increasing attacks by these militia groups have reportedly pushed US troops out of smaller, vulnerable outposts such as Taji, K1, al-Qaim and Key West to fortified bases in Iraq, Syria and Kuwait.

In a recent development, US-allied British forces are pulling out of Taji base, where more than two dozen coalition personnel, including an American soldier, an American contractor and a British soldier, were killed or wounded in an attack in March by the newly emerged League of Revolutionaries.

Iran’s readjusted strategy is intended to drain US-led forces of the will and resources to remain in Iraq. Iran may not see them actually leave, but it wants to make it as expensive as possible for them to remain.

In that, the US decision to kill the Iranian general has strengthened Iran’s hand.

The great irony of the Iranian intelligence reports obtained by The Intercept and published jointly with the New York Times is that they don’t necessarily expose Iran as the bad guy that Washington and others in the Middle East argue it is. If anything, the revelations published to date highlight the magnitude of the problems caused by successive US administrations that have pursued a destructive and counterproductive Middle East policy, which first created the opportunity for Iran to assert its interests in Iraq and then fixated on Iran as the greatest source of instability in the Middle East.

The provenance of the documents is certainly curious: they’re purportedly from an Iraqi with access to secret intelligence reports from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) who wanted to ‘let the world know what Iran is doing in my country’. But the excerpts published so far present a credible picture of Iran’s intelligence and security operations in Iraq and provide an interesting counterpoint to the US narrative on the security situation there.

The New York Times notes that Iran’s MOIS operatives are portrayed in the reports as ‘patient, professional and pragmatic’. Their focus was on keeping Iraq from falling apart and ‘descending into sectarian warfare that might make Shia Muslims the targets of violence; and from spinning off an independent Kurdistan that would threaten regional stability and Iranian territorial integrity’.

The reports also outline MOIS’s actions against Islamic State, which included conducting intelligence operations (resulting in penetrations of IS’s leadership group), providing covert aid to IS’s enemies and working to break its alliance with other insurgent factions. Intriguingly, Iran wanted to coordinate anti-IS operations with the US, but was frustrated by Washington’s refusal to do so. One report noted, ‘The Americans’ insistence on not cooperating with Iran in the war against ISIS and not participating in the meetings with the 10 countries of the region—the Arabs and Turkey—as well as the Western and Arab countries’ extreme positions on the presence and role of Iran in Iraq has had a negative influence.’

The reports also document Iran’s adroitness in filling the vacuum created by the US’s 2011 troop withdrawal from Iraq. As part of the drawdown, the US terminated its relationship with most of its stable of intelligence sources in Iraq. Many of them then offered their services to MOIS, and some were debriefed by their new Iranian case officers on US intelligence priorities and tradecraft, including the locations of CIA safe houses, details of tactical and surveillance training, and the names of other US sources in Iraq.

But the role assumed by Iran following the US’s troop drawdown went much further than just taking over US intelligence sources across Iraq. By stepping into the void created by the US withdrawal, Tehran effectively assumed the role of security guarantor for Iraq. As noted by The Intercept, which references Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule to characterise the US’s failure in Iraq, ‘[T]he US shattered Iraq and ultimately walked away. It was Iran that ended up figuring out what to do with the pieces.’

The snippets from the intelligence reports confirm that both MOIS and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp have penetrated the Iraqi political leadership, bureaucracy and military and are exercising pervasive influence across the country.

Importantly, they also confirm strong differences between MOIS and the hardline IRGC on Iran’s strategy in Iraq. MOIS was concerned that military operations by IRGC’s Shia proxies in Iraq were alienating the local Sunni population, assessing that Iran’s gains in Iraq where ‘being squandered because Iraqis so resented the Shia militia and the Quds Force that sponsored them’. MOIS singled out IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani for criticism, painting him as a ‘dangerous self-promoter using the anti-ISIS campaign as a launching pad for a political career back home in Iran’.

But what the leaked reports make clear is that there are elements in Tehran’s establishment—specifically MOIS, but also potentially the Iranian Foreign Ministry—that appear to be pursuing an Iraq policy more focused on ensuring security and stability than on establishing pervasive influence and Shia dominance. The problem for these more constructive elements in the Iranian government is that hardline elements from the IRGC, notably the Quds Force, are in the ascendancy and are determining the direction of Iran’s operations in Iraq.

And the problem for the US in this context is that the policies of Donald Trump’s administration have arguably played a direct role in empowering hardline elements in Tehran at the expense of more moderate interests. As noted in The Atlantic, Washington played into the IRGC’s hands by terminating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program at a time when Iranian President Hassan Rouhani—who had expended political capital in support of the agreement—had prioritised curbing the IRGC’s reach. Furthermore, the US’s resumption of sanctions against Iran directly benefited the IRGC financially, because it dominates and profits from the black-market economy and smuggling network in Iran.

One has to wonder when reading these excerpts what the security situation in the Middle East  would look like now if the US had put its differences with Iran to one side and made better use of opportunities for cooperation and collaboration, particularly in operations targeting IS. Such collaboration might have created space to resolve some of the more thorny issues arising from both the US’s and Iran’s activities in the region. It also would have empowered those in Tehran who are open to rapprochement with the West.

And while it’s highly unlikely that the Trump administration will change its trajectory with respect to Iran, which appears destined for military confrontation, hopefully the release of these intelligence reports will prompt key decision-makers in Washington to reflect on their strategy in the Middle East.

Australia is not alone in declining to bring home from Syria our citizens who fought with Islamic State and their families. The French government is just one of numerous Western governments that have taken a similar position, so we’re in good bad company.

The reason, we’re told, is that it’s the least bad choice. The security situation in Syria is too dangerous to put officials at risk to collect our citizens, and the men and women who travelled there to join IS have made their choices and must now live with the consequences.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has told us that he’s been advised that some of the Australian women in Syria are ‘hardcore’ and ‘have the potential and capacity to come back here and commit a mass casualty attack’.

The public debate has centred on what to do—or not do—with around 20 women and 40 children in camps in the Syrian region that is being wrestled over by Syrian, Russian, Turkish and Kurdish forces, as well as a small number of male IS members held in prisons or detention camps in Syria.

And that’s the problem. Our government, along with many other Western governments, is thinking about this problem as if the small number of IS-associated Australian nationals who are now in Syria are the only ones who are prepared to fight with or support jihadist terrorist groups in the Middle East. The assumption is that this is just a legacy problem flowing from the demise of IS’s so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

Unfortunately, that’s just plain wrong. IS no longer operates a brutal state-like caliphate, but it’s still a resilient and capable terrorist organisation. Its fighters are already using the chaos in Syria to escape from camps and get back to business. And the security and governmental situations in both Syria and Iraq are creating ideal conditions for its resurgence and regrowth.

The mass protests in Iraq over government corruption, the continued Shia–Sunni grievances and resurging Sunni anger, and Iran’s support to militias that undermine Iraqi sovereignty are just some of the reasons Iraq is returning as a renewed source of terrorist violence and instability.

In Syria, Bashar al-Assad is tightening his grip, including over the Kurds who fought IS so successfully. But even with Russia’s help, he won’t be able to control Syria in a way that prevents the presence and activity of numerous terrorist groups, including IS and al-Qaeda offshoots. His brutality will be a source of motivation for people to support such organisations.

So, we’re dealing with a long-term terrorist insurgency in both Syria and Iraq, not with the tail end of a problem that is now solved. This brings two very different factors into play that our government—and other like-minded governments—should be thinking about when they’re deciding what to do with our nationals.

First, the Australian men, women and children now in prisons, detention centres and camps in Syria and Iraq should not be seen a fixed, finite stock of people to be dealt with. Instead, we need to think of them as part of a continuing flow of people who will seek to fight with or support terrorist groups there.

The failure to think this way is not new. Since 10 September 2001, the coalition of nations fighting al-Qaeda and later versions of jihadist terrorism have focused on body counts of slain terrorists as if that will eventually solve the problem, despite seeing the number of people recruited into terrorist groups continue to grow. What we do now can either increase that flow or slow it.

The second factor is one of geography and technology. Our public debate is all about the risk that having returned fighters, supporters and their families back in Australia would pose to our security. And there are real risks here, as we have heard.

But there’s another risk we aren’t talking about. People in Syria working with terrorist groups don’t need to travel home to pose a direct security risk for us here on the streets of Australia. They can do that via the internet from right there in Syria.

We know this from painful experience already. Neil Prakash, who’s now imprisoned in Turkey, is the obvious example. He recruited Australians to fight with IS through extremely effective online campaigns and internet propaganda and became one of Australia’s most wanted terrorists as a result. He also exhorted Australians to rise up and attack non-Muslims ‘before they attack you’. And he was allegedly involved in planning terror plots here in Australia. All of it was done from the comfort of his locations in either Iraq or Syria with IS.

Leaving foreign nationals, including Australia’s, in Syria and Iraq where they can organise, incite attacks, recruit and create propaganda is a very bad idea given that we’re in a long campaign against these groups that pose a risk to our own communities as well as to the people of Iraq and Syria. Remember that in September 2001 it was a small group of foreign nationals in Afghanistan with the freedom to think, organise and act who started this whole thing.

Bringing fighters—male and female—and their supporters, spouses and children back to Australia carries obvious risks. However, Australian laws provide many paths for bringing members and supporters of terrorist groups to justice and we should use all of them here. We have highly developed law enforcement, community service, mental health and educational agencies and private-sector groups that are far better placed to manage the damaged people we will bring back than the creaking and broken systems in Syria and Iraq.

Leaving our nationals in Syria and Iraq will keep them in an environment that is conducive to the creation of tighter and more radical networks among themselves and with others than they have now. It leaves them in control of children who have already likely been exposed to horrific brutality and who are now living in conditions that are ripe ground for extremist recruitment.

Our public debate is emphasising the prospect of some of the Australian women conducting a mass casualty attack here in Australia. But let’s also consider our responsibility to avoid an attack in 2025 and attacks in 2026, 2027 and 2030 organised by some very hardcore young fighters. Right now, those potential future fighters are small children in Syria. If we leave them there, they will have every reason to be highly motivated against Australia because of how we dealt with them and their families back in 2019.

In determining the fate of Australians in Iraq and Syria, we need to look beyond our own quiet satisfaction that bad people are getting what they deserve. Acting in accordance with our values and taking responsibility for managing our own citizens, including by holding those who have engaged in acts of terrorism to account, is the best way of demonstrating that the IS narrative of a decayed West that is anti-Muslim is wrong. In contrast, leaving our nationals there reinforces the terrorist narrative and also gives all of them—the men, women and children—little hope of a path to the exit from an extremist future.

Australia’s security will be best served by bringing them home and using all the means of our government and society to hold them to account and then rehabilitate them. This will take that rarest of commodities—political courage—and require clear public communication of the overall set of risks we face and the options we have in dealing with them. But that’s what good public policy is about.

So, let’s get beyond the slogans and the fear and do what’s in our long-term national interest.

On 29 September, the ADF announced that eight Iraqi civilians, including two children, were believed to have been killed or seriously injured during its operations against the Islamic State terror group in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

The chief of joint operations, Vice Admiral David Johnston, revealed details of two events he described as tragic and unintentional.

These two episodes demonstrate the extreme difficulty of fighting an enemy that murdered and raped its way across Iraq until it was stopped, in large part, by coalition air strikes and that shelters in densely built-up areas among civilians. The losses also prompt a look at the processes the ADF has in place to avoid civilian casualties as the fighting continues.

IS rampaged through northern Iraq in 2014, using a spearhead of vehicles packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers as a form of human artillery to overwhelm stunned Iraqi army units. It captured the major city of Mosul, shooting or beheading thousands of prisoners, declared a caliphate and set up slave markets where women and young girls and boys were sold to its fighters.

A US-led coalition launched a counter campaign using air power to blunt the IS advance while instructors and advisers, including many from Australia, helped rebuild the confidence of the shaken Iraqis.

This was a strategy easily applied in the early days when IS operated as a supremely confident conventional force riding in US vehicles captured from the Iraqis and streaming black flags. The terror group was out in the open and relatively easy to hit.

That changed when the campaign switched to brutal face-to-face fighting in the narrow streets of Mosul’s old quarter. As the fighting progressed from house to house, the IS fighters rounded up civilians as human shields and set booby traps behind them as they retreated.

This time, Iraq troops proved willing to take on IS and they died in large numbers retaking the city with its estimated 1 million inhabitants. Between 1,200 and 1,500 Iraqi soldiers were killed and an estimated 8,000 more wounded. That toll would have been vastly more if it were not for allied air power.

Commanders on the ground noted that precision weapons launched by pilots with a view of the action beamed to them from manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft were much more likely to hit their the enemy and much less likely to kill civilians than artillery fired by troops on the ground. Pilots have the right to abort attacks if they or their commanders have any doubt about their targets. Australia’s rules of engagement are among the most robust of all the coalition nations in Iraq, and key officers all along the command chain, from the cockpit back to Canberra, have the right to throw up a red card if they’re not satisfied about the safety of hitting any ­target.

Modern GPS- or laser-guided bombs have significantly reduced the likelihood of unintended casualties. A pilot at 20,000 feet can usually hit a target the size of a garage door on a building 20 kilometres away.

In the World War II battle for Normandy, at least 15,000 French civilians were killed, many of them by bombs dropped from hundreds of Allied heavy aircraft that were covering huge areas to score relatively few direct hits on their intended targets.

Coalition commanders say 53,948 air attacks were carried out in Iraq and Syria between August 2014 and August 2017. They say those strikes killed large numbers of IS fighters and at least 735 civilians. Those killed included more than 100 civilians who died when a US air strike in Mosul detonated explosives that had been placed in a building by IS.

A further 350 claims that civilians were killed in strikes are still being investigated. Some of those involve more than one death.

The first incident described by Johnston occurred on 30 March this year, when a member of the ADF was part of the decision-making chain that authorised an air strike on a group of people believed to be armed IS fighters in a position to attack advancing Iraqi forces. Seven civilians were killed or injured, including one believed to have been a child.

An intelligence assessment followed (as it does with all such strikes), which indicated that, despite earlier advice to the contrary, those killed were not armed. A briefing given to the media didn’t clarify who was responsible for the miscalculation, or which allied country carried the responsibility.

No Australian aircraft were involved in the operation and it’s not known exactly what role the ADF member played.

ADF personnel fill key roles in such operations. Some are aircrew in the strike jets or command and control aircraft and tankers. Some are legal and other advisers who assess whether targets are legitimate and safe to hit. Others are members of the special forces (joint terminal attack controllers) who follow the progress of Iraqi forces using imagery from manned and unmanned aircraft and, when necessary, call in air strikes to support them.

Johnston said that the information that the people targeted were armed came from a credible source which those involved in the decision-making process had no reason to question.

The second incident occurred on 7 June, when Iraqi troops who were pinned down by IS fighters firing on them from a residential building 20 metres from their position called for help. A RAAF Hornet strike aircraft was sent to hit the building.

After an assessment of the target, the jet dropped a ‘low collateral’ precision-guided bomb, designed to hit the IS fighters without killing others in the vicinity or causing excessive damage.

The bomb is believed to have killed or injured two IS members and a civilian who was carried out of the building in somebody’s arms. The civilian appeared from surveillance footage to be a child.

Johnston said Australia’s strict rules of engagement were followed. Everything possible was done to ensure targeted areas were clear of civilians before and during the strike. While there is always a risk of inadvertent casualties from combat operations, the process was highly effective, he said. Additional training has since been introduced for those involved in calling for, planning and assessing attacks.

As the officer in charge of operations in Australia and overseas, Johnston had just emerged from a ‘targeting board’ meeting at his Joint Operations Command HQ in New South Wales when he spoke to The Strategist. The board had considered a query from a commander in the Middle East about whether the RAAF could hit an IS position.

Such decisions can sometimes be made by the forces in Iraq, but they’re passed up the line to HQ JOC when there are doubts about the presence of civilians or concerns that buildings such as mosques or other valuable infrastructure might be damaged. If necessary, Johnston can send them up the line to the chief of the ADF and the secretary of the Defence Department, and then to the defence minister if necessary.

The headquarters has to be constantly on top of what’s occurring on the ground. Specialists need a thorough understanding of the environment in which the forces are deployed, how tactics are changing and how the campaign is developing, so that when a decision is sent back for Johnson to make, he knows exactly what’s happening. Johnston says the need for good situational awareness washes all the way through the headquarters. ‘The Iraq operations have forced us to focus on how we lead, contribute to, and manage complex operations with complex Australian national forces deployed. My intelligence specialists need to be kept engaged; the targeting specialists are constantly watching.’

Targeting meetings start with an operations update. ‘That’s followed by an intelligence update—what the adversary is doing so that we’re clear on any changes in tactics’, Johnston says. ‘The targeting specialist will then present on the decision that’s required and the factors relevant to it. Then the key legal advisers will say here are your rules of engagement and the legal authorities available to you and they’ll provide me with a view on whether the proposed actions are consistent with them.

‘[The briefing] has all of the people I need to help me understand—what are we trying to deliver, what are the risks associated with it, how does it stand with our authorities? It’s a pretty robust discussion at times with various views. We’ll work our way through all of that and in the end I have to make a decision on whether to go ahead or not’, says Johnston. ‘I agree, or disagree or decide it’s not within my authority and elevate it for CDF to make a decision—or beyond that.’

Intelligence assessment processes across the coalition forces were strengthened last year after an air raid killed up to 83 Syrian government soldiers who were mistaken for IS members.

A series of mistakes resulted in aircraft from Australia, Britain, Denmark and the US killing the Syrian troops in their camp near Dayr az Zawr early on 18 September 2016. The camp was hit by 37 bombs and missiles, including six bombs dropped by RAAF F/A-18 Hornets. A RAAF Wedgetail early warning and control aircraft, also over Syria, helped coordinate the mission but its crew was not involved in planning the strike.

A senior RAAF officer said the realisation that they hit Syrian troops fighting ISIS was ‘gut-wrenching’ for the Australians.

The US-led investigation found that the airstrikes were conducted in full compliance with the rules of engagement and the laws of armed conflict. But coalition intelligence assessors made a ­series of small miscalculations and important clues were missed when the operation was planned.

In a frighteningly difficult war against an inhumane enemy, the tragic outcome was a consequence of what the investigators called ‘human factors’.