Ten years ago, nearly 3,500 U.S. troops fought—and 54 died—to suppress tribal warfare and an al-Qaeda insurgency on a battleground known as the “Triangle of Death.” The Army’s 10th Mountain Division appealed to the U.S. Institute of Peace to organize an Iraqi peace accord that could bring real stability for the area. Months of painstaking work by Iraqis and Americans yielded a reconciliation that still sustains stability in Mahmoudiya even amid the warfare elsewhere in Iraq.

A decade later, as ISIS brutality and warfare have shattered much of Iraq anew, Mahmoudiya remains a zone of relative peace, says local tribal leader Fareeq al-Ghereri in a new video (above) about one of Iraq’s most successful local peace accords.

“When ISIS overran much of Iraq in 2014, it could not successfully penetrate Mahmoudiya,” former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey noted in a recent essay in The Hill.

Mahmoudiya was the first of several Iraqi cities where Iraqi peace mediators, trained and supported by USIP, have led in averting the communal warfare that has been exploited by armed factions, notably the ISIS extremist group. Peace accords also have improved stability in Tikrit and Yathrib, letting hundreds of thousands of displaced people return home. Local peacemaking will be essential to stabilizing the Mosul region following its recovery from ISIS rule, and preventing a resurgence of extremism that could risk again drawing in foreign forces. Mahmoudiya can provide a model, Iraq experts say.

In a 15-month deployment to Mahmoudiya, the 10th Mountain Division’s 2nd Brigade “lost 54 soldiers killed and 267 wounded,” recalled the brigade’s commander at the time, retired Colonel Mike Kershaw. Sunni and Shia tribes traded acts of vengeance, and extremists used the conflict to advance a campaign of terrorism. To achieve stability, “we could clearly see that there were political needs, economic needs, but frankly we don’t have that level of expertise resident in our organization,” said Kershaw.

That led Kershaw and his team to call in USIP, which for years had been training Iraqi peace mediators. “The fact that we could get Iraqis to help in these negotiations—there was no other U.S. entity that could give us something like that,” Kershaw said.

Once the peace accord took hold, “the electricity was re-connected, the roads that were destroyed by terrorism were rebuilt, and people went back to their jobs,” al-Ghereri said. “South Baghdad [province] transformed from a triangle of death into a triangle of peace.”

The U.S. Army was able to reduce its deployment in Mahmoudiya by 80 percent, to just 650 troops. After losing more than 50 soldiers killed each year in the area before the accord, U.S. forces lost one killed in the year afterward, Kershaw has noted.

Kershaw recently joined Iraq and foreign policy experts at USIP and The Heritage Foundation in urging similar local-level mediation in Mosul and other areas liberated from ISIS as the only way to consolidate a stabilization of Iraq and to sustainably promote security in Iraq and the region.

Related Publications

Iraq’s Provincial Council Elections: The Way Forward in Nineveh Province

Iraq’s Provincial Council Elections: The Way Forward in Nineveh Province

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

By: Osama Gharizi;  Yomnna Helmi

On December 18, Iraqis will elect members of the provincial councils, the highest oversight bodies of subnational government and key providers of public services. The elections are the first at the provincial level in over a decade and come in the wake of the 2019 anti-government protests that resulted in the dissolution of the provincial councils following demands from the protesters who accused them of corruption. Recent findings from the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Conflict and Stabilization Monitoring Framework in Nineveh Province reveal that candidates are facing a distrustful electorate that is lacking confidence in state institutions.

Type: Analysis

Democracy & Governance

Climate Adaption Key to Iraq’s Stability and Economic Development

Climate Adaption Key to Iraq’s Stability and Economic Development

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

By: Sarhang Hamasaeed;  Mac Skelton;  Zmkan Ali Saleem

Iraq is projected to be among the five countries hardest hit by the impact of climate change. The country is already witnessing depreciating water supply and accelerating desertification, leading to the loss of as much as 60,000 acres of arable land each year, according to Iraqi government and United Nations sources. These climate phenomena threaten the livelihoods and food security of Iraq’s population of an estimated 43 million, creating conditions for displacement, instability and a deterioration of social cohesion. The water crisis has grown steadily amid severe drought, upstream damming practices in Turkey and Iran, and increased domestic consumption within Iraq’s borders.

Type: Analysis

EnvironmentGlobal Policy

Iraq’s al-Sudani Government, One Year Later

Iraq’s al-Sudani Government, One Year Later

Thursday, November 2, 2023

By: Sarhang Hamasaeed

Last week marked one year since Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani assumed office. His ascension to the role came after a year of deep political tensions, several alarming but contained episodes of violence, and no annual government budget. A political agreement among the Shia coalition known as the Coordination Framework and major Kurdish and Sunni Arab parties set the stage for the al-Sudani government to form — meanwhile, the biggest winner in the 2021 parliamentary elections, cleric and political leader Moqtada al-Sadr, decided to withdraw from the political process altogether.

Type: Analysis

Democracy & Governance

View All Publications