Battle for Mosul can shape or break Iraq
further
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[October 24, 2016]
By Samia Nakhoul, Michael Georgy and Stephen Kalin
ERBIL (Reuters) - It has taken two years of
training a demoralized army, backed up by the air cover and special
forces of the world’s greatest powers, for Iraq to mount an offensive to
recapture Mosul from Islamic State.
Almost week into the U.S.-led onslaught, many of those running the
campaign say the battle to retake the city could be long and hard. But
they have also identified what they think is a chink in the jihadists'
armor.
If local fighters in Mosul can be persuaded to drop their allegiance to
Islamic State, there is a chance that the battle can be brought to a
more speedy conclusion, and that could have major implications for the
future of Iraq.
Against a background of splits and rebellions in the Islamic State ranks
in Mosul, some opposing commanders believe that a successful attempt to
win over those local fighters could mean the battle lasts only weeks
rather than months.
Mosul, Iraq's second biggest city, is where IS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi declared his Sunni caliphate in 2014, after his alliance
between millenarian Islamists and veteran officers from the disbanded
army of Saddam Hussein roared back into Iraq from bases they set up in
the mayhem of Syria's war. Five Iraqi army divisions melted away before
jihadis numbered in hundreds.
Now the battle to retake Mosul pits an unwieldy coalition of a
30,000-strong Iraqi regular force backed by the US and Europeans,
alongside Kurdish and Shi’ite militias, against jihadis who have
exploited the Sunni community’s sense of dispossession in Iraq and
betrayal in Syria.
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Not just its outcome but the political sensitivity with which this
battle is handled could determine the future of Islamic State and Sunni
extremism, as well as the shape of this part of the Middle East, which
is being shattered into sectarian fragments.
Islamic State fighters, estimated at between 4,000 and 8,000, have
rigged the city with explosives, mined and booby-trapped roads, built
oil-filled moats they can set alight, dug tunnels, and trenches and have
shown every willingness to use Mosul’s up to 1.5 million civilians as
human shields.
Islamic State would seem to have a plentiful supply of suicide bombers,
launching them in scores of explosives-laden trucks against Kurdish
peshmerga fighters converging on Mosul from the east and northeast, and
Iraqi forces, spearheaded by counter-terrorism units, advancing from the
south and southwest.
"Mosul will be a multi-month endeavor. This is going to take a long
time," a senior U.S. official said in Iraq.
CALIPHATE
Karim Sinjari, Interior Minister in the self-governing Kurdistan
Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq, said IS would put up a
fierce fight because of Mosul's symbolic value as capital of its
self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.
"If Mosul is finished the caliphate they announced is finished. If they
lose in Mosul, they will have no place, just Raqqa (in Syria)," Sinjari
said.
Adept at exploiting divisions among its enemies, last Friday's dawn
assault by IS on Kirkuk, for example, was not just an attempt to divert
Iraqi and Kurdish forces and relieve pressure on the main front.
It was also intended to galvanize Sunni Arab opinion against the Kurds,
whose Iraqi peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish militia have fielded the most
effective ground forces against IS.
That is why many of those invested in the battle for Mosul stress the
need to break the cohesion of IS and the allegiance it has won or
coerced among alienated Sunni, in Mosul and beyond.
The opportunity is there, they say.
They believe that while foreign jihadis will fight to the finish to
protect their last stronghold in Iraq, the Iraqi fighters, many from
Mosul itself, may lay down their arms.
“Most of the (IS) fighters now are local tribal fighters. They have some
foreign fighters, they have some people from other parts of Iraq and
Syria, but the majority are local fighters,” says a senior Kurdish
military intelligence chief.
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“If we can take this away from them, the liberation of Mosul is a job of
a week or two weeks.”
FISSURES
Fissures are widening inside the IS camp, with Iraqi, Kurdish and
Western sources reporting resistance in Mosul and a spate of attacks on
its leaders.
Sinjari, also the KRG acting defense minister, says there is growing
resentment against the group's brutality.
“There is information that many people are revolting and carrying out
attacks against IS. A number of Daesh members were killed on the streets
at night," Sinjari said. This was confirmed by the U.S. official but
could not be independently verified.
It fits with accounts of a recent abortive uprising against IS, led by a
former aide to Baghdadi, that ended with the execution of 58 Daesh
dissidents.
Crucially, more than half IS’s fighting strength comes from Sunni tribes
initially relieved they were being freed from sectarian persecution by a
Shi’ite dominated government in Baghdad and a corrupt and brutal army.
Some strategists believe those tribes could turn against the brutality
of IS rule – just as the Sunni tribal fighters of the Sahwa or Awakening
turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq a decade ago – if Baghdad guarantees
their lives and livelihoods.
In Mosul, there are Iraqi tribal people in IS who pledged allegiance
when the group arrived, a Kurdish intelligence chief said.
“If the Iraqis send a message and reassure these Sunni Iraqis that they
will be given a second chance I think it is wise to do so, because if
they put their weapons down you are definitely taking out 60 percent of
their (IS) fighting force”.
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![](../images/102416pics/news_L21.jpg)
raqi army gather after the liberation of a village from Islamic
State militants, south of Mosul, during an operation to attack
Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq, October 21, 2016, as toxic
smoke is seen over the area after Islamic State militants set fire
to a sulphur factory. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudan
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The official emphasized the need for the US-led coalition’s close
involvement in Mosul, especially after the experience of the
recapture of Falluja, Ramadi and Tikrit, IS-held cities where
refugees and local Sunnis suffered at the hands of Shi’ite militias.
In the battle for Mosul, it has supposedly been agreed that neither
Shi’ite fighters nor Kurdish peshmerga will enter the city when it
falls to avoid stoking a sectarian backlash.
While the anti-IS coalition has gained momentum, military
strategists and intelligence officials say the closer the Iraqi
forces get to Mosul, the harder it will be.
"If they decide to defend the city then it will be more difficult
and the process will slow down," the intelligence chief said.
Once inside Mosul, Iraqi special forces would have to go from street
to street to clear explosives and booby traps set up by Islamic
State.
"The roads are very narrow. You can’t use vehicles or tanks, so it
will be a fight, person by person," Sinjari said.
VILLAGES
Until now, it has been easy for the coalition to hit IS positions in
deserted villages around Mosul but the air strikes will slow down
once Iraqi forces get into the city.
Islamic State, Iraqi commanders say, have succeeded in the past in
blocking army troops from moving against them by staging suicide
attacks and rigging explosives.
But they say that would no longer be an obstacle in Mosul as the
Iraqi army has recently received an effective guided missile system
that destroys explosives-packed vehicles.
The Iraqi commanders say their tactic now would be to cut Islamic
State fighters off from the hinterland of supporting villages then
split the city into different neighborhoods.
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Brigadier Haider Abdul Muhsin al-Darraji, from the army 10th
division, said military units would launch simultaneous attacks from
multiple fronts on Mosul, divide the city into sectors to isolate IS
fighters. And with coalition air strikes the jihadis will have
little chance of getting reinforcements from the western side, which
has been left open to encourage their departure towards Syria.
The difficulty is how to hit IS targets inside Mosul without causing
massive civilian casualties.
"Its just like a tough surgery to remove a brain tumor," Darraji
said.
Colonel Mahdi Ameer from the 9th Iraqi army division fighting south
of Mosul said Islamic State had "deliberately blocked residents from
leaving the city to use them as human shields and prolong the
battle".
Islamic State’s enemies do not underestimate the group’s strength,
which depends on experienced former senior Baathist officers and
Islamist radicals willing to blow themselves up to defend their
Sunni heartland.
"They are much more organized than the peshmerga and others. They
have good administration, a good support system and enough weapons
and ammunitions,” said the Kurdish counter-terrorism official.
The Mosul offensive will be the most important battle fought in Iraq
since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. What happens next will shape or
break an already fractured Iraq.
"There are growing concerns about fixing the political peace the day
after liberating Mosul," said Hoshyar Zebari, a top Iraqi politician
and former finance minister.
"How will this multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian city ... be governed
and run without communal conflict, without revenge killing, without
a large displacement of people? That needs some political planning
on how the city will be governed. It should have a strong
representative governance in the city."
But the battle against radical Islamists in the region will not end
with the liberation of Mosul.
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"Mosul is not be the end of Islamic State or the end of extremism in
this region. They will go back to more asymmetric warfare. We will
see suicide attacks inside Kurdistan, inside Iraqi cities and
elsewhere."
(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; editing by Giles Elgood)
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