The EU has been a partner of Iraq since 2003, engaging originally as one of the country’s main donors at the 2003 Madrid Conference after the US-led invasion ‘Helping the Iraqi People Build a new Iraq’. At the time, the EU and its Member States pledged US$1.44 billion to the International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq (IRFFI).[67] It subsequently launched the civil crisis management mission EUJUST LEX-Iraq in 2005 as well as establishing a small delegation in Baghdad in December of the same year.[68] EUJUST LEX-Iraq was the first EU integrated Rule of Law mission under the CSDP with a mandate primarily geared towards training high- and mid-level officials in the criminal justice system. It was entirely based in Brussels from 2005 to 2009, providing training only in Europe. From 2009 to 2013, the mission operated from Baghdad with satellite offices in Erbil and Basra. Although the mission trained over 7,000 officials during its lifecycle, its impact appears to have been highly constrained by prevailing levels of insecurity and the absence of a more holistic approach to rule of law development.[69]

Building on the International Compact with Iraq (2007) and wishing to shift its support from short-term emergency reconstruction projects towards longer-term development (2009), the EU put its relations with Iraq on a legal footing through the EU-Iraq Partnership Cooperation Agreement (PCA), which was concluded in November 2009, signed in 2012, and came into effect in 2018 (nine years later). It focused on governance, socioeconomic recovery, water management and agriculture.[70] In January 2010, the EU and Iraq signed an Energy Memorandum of Understanding and the EU deployed an Election Assessment Team (EAT) at the request of the Government of Iraq to support the Iraqi parliament (Council of Representatives) ahead of the elections in March 2010.

The EU’s institutional response to the emergence of Islamic State (2014–2017)

European engagement in Iraq reverted to humanitarian assistance in 2014 when IS marched on Baghdad, mobilising about €1 billion over the next few years. The European Commission’s humanitarian office ECHO established itself in Erbil in 2014 and implemented an Iraq-wide humanitarian assistance programme reaching 3.2 million internally displaced Iraqi and 250,000 Syrian refugees over the next two years. From 2015 onwards, the EU also engaged in a number of recovery activities – including national reconciliation and stabilisation efforts (provision of security and basic services, initial rehabilitation of infrastructure), removing unexploded ordinance, counter-terrorism training, protection of cultural heritage, accountability for IS crimes and border control capacity building – via projects financed by the Instrument Contributing to Peace and Stability.[71] An example of a national reconciliation effort is the ‘Supporting Iraq National Reconciliation’ project (CMI, 2015–2017) focusing on comprehensive (re-)integration of Sunni ‘opposition’ into national politics without, however, achieving much by way of concrete results. Moreover, in 2015, UNDP established the Funding Facility for Stabilization (FFS) at the request of the Government of Iraq and with substantial EU support to stabilise areas liberated from IS (i.e. mostly Kirkuk, Nineveh and Anbar). Operating rapidly and efficiently, it focused on the rehabilitation of public infrastructure (especially schools and hospitals), electricity and livelihood opportunities through cash-for-work programmes.[72]

The EU also adopted its strategy for Syria and Iraq in 2015, which enabled greater attention for the security side of the conflict such as strengthening Iraqi counter-terrorism capabilities (strategy, interoperability and respect for human rights), and training for Iraqi federal and local police forces, as well as Kurdish paramilitary and intelligence forces (Zeravani and Asaysh) in areas liberated from IS. Despite paying some attention to the root causes of IS in Iraq – namely the US-led invasion, exclusive governance and abusive rule – the regional strategy focused squarely on IS, an omission which has characterised EU intervention in Iraq ever since.[73] It has been in similar vein that the annual EU Council conclusions between 2014 and 2019 did not take stock of the destructive legacy of al-Maliki either, be it in terms of the grievances or in terms of the sectarianism his rule deepened.[74] And neither did the EU Council conclusions meaningfully highlight Sunni marginalization between 2014 and 2019, even though they regularly mention problems faced by Yazidi and Christian minorities.[75]

EU institutional engagement after Islamic State (2017–2020)

As territories held by IS were progressively liberated, the EU reintroduced a development dimension to its engagement while maintaining its humanitarian assistance at a lower but appreciable level of funding. A key intervention in the post-IS period was the launch of the European Union Advisory Mission in support of the Security Sector Reform in Iraq (EUAM in Iraq) in October 2017.[76] A CSDP civilian mission tasked with implementation of the civilian-related aspects of the Iraqi National Security Strategy, EUAM focused mostly on: (i) providing strategic advice on the National Strategy and SSR coordination; (ii) national security legislation; (iii) command and control and crisis management; (iv) strategic human resources management; (v) countering terrorism and organised crime; (vi) modernisation of federal intelligence; (vii) integrated border management.[77]

In 2018, the EU replaced/complemented its regional strategy on Syria and Iraq with one dedicated to Iraq itself. It essentially laid out a roadmap balancing longer-term development and reconciliation objectives with shorter-term humanitarian aid and stabilisation initiatives.[78] One pertinent aspect – especially given the low prioritisation of such work by the Iraqi Government itself – has been the EU’s commissioning of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD) to create and run a project fostering the resolution of grievances between local actors and the Iraqi Government, and among local leaders themselves, in Basra, Nineveh, Anbar and Salah ad-Din. In Nineveh, in particular, the project appears to have laid the foundations for dialogue between the Yazidis and Sunni tribes. To underline its engagement, the EU co-chaired the February 2018 Kuwait ‘International Conference for the Reconstruction of Iraq’ where it also pledged EUR 400 million in grants to support reconstruction and reconciliation in Iraq.[79]

Interim conclusions

Simply put, EU engagement in Iraq shifted from statebuilding (before IS) to humanitarian/stabilisation efforts (during IS) and back to statebuilding (after IS). Starting in 2014, the EU has provided significant levels of aid to Iraq, which has helped mitigate the impact of the brutal fight against IS via humanitarian aid and recovery initiatives in affected governorates. The problem has been the conceptualisation of the fight against IS – or rather, the lack of it. There is little on record of the period in the run up to the fall of Mosul being seen in policy terms as having played a fundamental role in bringing about the tragic years that followed. In other words, the rule of Prime Minister al-Maliki does not seem to have triggered any alarm bells in Brussels, which simply continued training Iraqi legal professionals via EUJUST-LEX while the Iraqi state was being thoroughly politicised and put on a clientelist footing. Even during the fight against IS, its defeat was prioritised as a standalone issue unconnected with the fact that it was largely a homegrown phenomenon. The EU Council conclusions between 2014 and 2019 neither included Iraqi domestic politics in their analysis as a root cause for the emergence of IS nor pointed to the problem of ongoing Sunni marginalisation. After the defeat of IS, there is some evidence of greater EU recognition of the need for reconciliation although without mention of Iraq’s Sunnis, focusing largely on Christian and Yazidi minorities.[80] If the EU Council conclusions are taken as proxy for the focus of EU diplomatic activity in Iraq itself, this suggests limited advocacy or programmatic action with the exception of the aforementioned HD Centre initiative. In other words, the EU’s political strategy for Iraq appears to be limited and lacking in acknowledgment of the key domestic political dynamics that led to war and crisis. Table 6 below maps the main EU policy packages against the course of the civil war.

Based on the preceding analysis, a few observations can be made regarding the relevance of EU policy to the conflict cycle of the Iraqi civil war. They are summarised in Table 7 and discussed below.

A few points of Table 7 deserve a short explanation. To start with, a major difference with EU engagement in Syria has been that the Iraqi government remained a workable partner for Brussels to cooperate with. Yet, the run-up to 2014 also shows how deceptive this modus operandi was as al-Maliki re-organised and cannibalised the Iraqi state to serve his own interests, those of the Da’awa party and, up to a point, Iran. The EU did not impose any conditionality on its engagement in the face of Iraq’s slide towards authoritarianism. It is also worth noting that the glacial progress of the PCA (start 2009; finish 2018, nearly a full decade ‘in the making’) limited the amount of political pressure the EU could bring to bear on Iraq as partner country. Although one would anticipate a learning curve, there is limited evidence that the EU engages differently today in view of the self-centred rule of Iraq’s political class, even though this has already led to massive protests for several years in a row (Iraq 1, 6 and 7).

As in Syria, the EU was irrelevant to the military dimension of the fight against IS in Iraq due to its being incapable of mobilising kinetic resources. But it did mobilise twice its next closest alternative in the form of a CSDP mission: before the fight against IS and after the fight against IS. Their foci on respectively the rule of law and civilian security sector reform made sense in their context of deployment. Nevertheless, both missions suffered from key performance issues:

In terms of addressing the softer aspects of the Iraqi civil war, the EU was effective in mobilising humanitarian assistance from 2014 onwards – in part by establishing the European Commission’s DG ECHO country headquarters in Erbil. Much of the EU’s engagement during the conflict was humanitarian in nature. Moreover, due to its ability to work directly with the Iraqi Government, it could start recovery and reconstruction programmes in a timely manner. Starting preparations in 2016, the EU could initiate its first initiatives in 2017 via the Funding Facility for Stabilization which followed in the footsteps of the military campaign against IS. It restored at least some basic services (education, healthcare, water and electricity) and job opportunities in liberated areas that would otherwise have been worse off.

Yet, despite these efforts, EU support appears to enjoy little political and social visibility in parts of Iraq (KRI especially), which reinforced its image as ‘payer’ rather than ‘player’.[83] This underlines the view that the EU’s political strategy and diplomatic advocacy can be improved. Better mobilisation of the EU’s political clout might also have helped to push the issue of reconciliation more firmly onto the national political agenda as a crucial ‘soft’ aspect of post-conflict recovery – in addition to the EU’s own programmatic initiative (Iraq 2, 5, 6 and 8).