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The Battle for Mosul Begins
The offensive on Mosul is beginning. Over the weekend, US and French jets pounded ISIS positions east of Mosul and began shelling ISIS positions, paving the way for a ground offensive. This morning, Kurdish forces began advancing on villages east of the city.
Over the weekend, ISIS killed 53 people in three separate attacks in Iraq, including a suicide bombing in Baghdad. Conditions in Mosul are dire, and will no doubt get far worse; if Mosul is laid waste, another million and a half refugees will pour into the region and beyond. (It’s unclear what the population of Mosul is now; there were two million people there before it was captured by ISIS, but as many as a million have already fled.)
The Pentagon recently announced the deployment of 615 more American troops to aid in the recapture. This brings the number of US personnel there to more than 5,262.
What has observers most worried is the ostensible lack of planning for the aftermath. In February 2015, nearly two years ago, Michael Knights and Michael Pregent (both excellent analysts) wrote a piece for Foreign Policy called How to Retake Mosul from the Islamic State. Their concerns are still apt. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Getting back into Mosul, they wrote, will be fraught with risk — but that’s probably the easiest part:
Mosul is the first battlefield in Iraq where all three major ethnosectarian blocs will converge upon one city, bringing their own agendas into the operation. Do the Kurds want the Iraqi Army back on their doorstep? Do local Sunnis want a new flood of strangers from Shiite southern Iraq policing their city? What happens if Shiite militiamen and volunteers enter the fight or if any of the liberating forces begin to punish suspected Islamic State collaborators within the population? Does the incursion occur in such a way as to splinter local Sunnis from the Islamic State or drive them together?
These questions matter because Mosul’s Sunni population has the muscle to determine the city’s fate. Thus far, with no help in sight, anywhere from 2,000 to 6,000 Islamic State fighters have dominated the city’s population. But there are probably well over 100,000 military-age males in Mosul with AK-47s in their closets who haven’t picked sides yet and are waiting to see what the government can offer them to fight the Islamic State. They have been betrayed by Baghdad before and will need strong reassurance, backed by the international community, that they will not be reoccupied by security forces alien to the city. But if the Iraqi government can assuage their fears, they could still yet join the fight against the Islamic State.
The region’s escalating ethnic and sectarian hostilities make this particularly fraught. The Iraqi Security Forces, Kurdish Peshmerga, Iran, Iranian-backed Shiite militias, Sunni fighters, and the United States will all be converging on the city at once. Erdoğan is insisting that Turkey, too, will take part in the battle even though the Iraqi government is categorically opposed. (In the early 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire was partitioned, Turkey claimed Mosul. The League of Nations awarded it to Iraq.) Iraq has demanded that Turkey withdraw the forces they deployed to the Bashiqa training camp near Mosul; the Turkish government has dismissed them outright, causing Iraq to request an emergency UN Security Council session.
The good news is that if Iraqi forces take Mosul, it will represent the most significant of a string of victories against ISIS, recently including the recapture of the Qayyara oil refinery and Iraq’s third-largest airbase. Mosul is the largest and most significant ISIS-held city. Once Mosul is retaken, ISIS’s days are numbered. Yesterday morning in Syria, too, the Free Syria Army (backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) advanced on Dabiq and reportedly took it over without encountering resistance. So ISIS has lost both the territory that allowed it to claim it was a state and the city that symbolized its apocalyptic vision.
The bad news is that as far as I can tell, no one has a plan for reintegrating Iraq’s Sunni Arabs — precisely the problem that gave rise to ISIS in the first place. What will fill the vacuum when ISIS is destroyed?
Published in Foreign Policy, General
The “precipitous withdrawal.”
You mean when we left as per our negotiated agreement to leave?
Let’s break the counterfactual chains here.
So, the Malaki, which wanted us to leave, would have to allow us to stay.
The Bush administration would have to have negotiated for us to stay.
President Obama, who ran and won on a platform of ending the war, would have to wanted us to stay.
In order that we could pressure the Malaki government from being mean to the Sunnis?
But we withdrew (when we agreed to), so we weren’t there to pressure the Malaki government and therefore … ISIS?
Chris Cuomo thinks you’re doing something illegal, Mr. genfrerei
You may devour as much of the Obama administration’s carefully shoveled output as you like. Nobody else is required to accept the laughable version of the facts presented here.
Look, all I did was point out that it was the Bush Administration who negotiated our departure from Iraq. In order for us to stay, we would’ve needed a new SOFA. There wasn’t political support for that in the US, and there definitely wasn’t in Iraq. They didn’t want us to stay. (And I can hardly blame them.)
So, in order for us to stay, we would’ve needed to do so against the explicit wishes of Iraq’s democratically elected government. I realize it’s inconvenient for that blame-Obama-for-ISIS trope and I know it’s uncomfortable to hear. But that’s just the facts.
Are you suggesting that we should’ve stayed against the explicit wishes of Iraq’s democratically elected government?
We had tons of leverage on Malaki to get a useful SOFA, which would have left adequate forces in place to handle problems. Bush felt as outgoing president he should leave it to Obama to negotiate. A mistake, one of many. Obama never wanted a SOFA. He wanted out so he could declare victory. The result is the stinking mess we now have.
Regardless, you are the beneficiary now because of the actions of the Romanian officers who did, in fact, stand them against a wall and shoot them.
What @kozak said.
VDH :
The surge engineered by General David Petraeus worked so well that Iraq was not much of an issue in the 2008 general election. President-elect Barack Obama entered office with a quiet Iraq. For example, about 60 American soldiers died in 2010 in combat-related operations in Iraq — or roughly 4 percent of all U.S. military deaths that year (1,485), the vast majority of these due to non-combat causes (motor-vehicle and training accidents, non-combat violence, suicide, drugs, illness, etc.). Although Obama had once stated that Iraq was the unwise war (in comparison to the wise Afghan war that he supported during the 2008 campaign), the relative post-surge quiet had changed somewhat, for a third time, popular attitudes about the war. Indeed, Afghanistan by 2010 was the problematic conflict, Iraq the apparently successful occupation.
No wonder, then, that Vice President Joe Biden in February 2010 claimed that Iraq was so successful that it might well become one of the administration’s “greatest achievements.” Obama himself was eager, given the apparent calm, to pull out all U.S. peacekeepers before the 2012 election. A mostly quiet Iraq, contrasted with the escalating violence in Afghanistan and the turmoil of the Arab Spring, apparently made that withdrawal possible — so much so that Obama declared: “We’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”
Suddenly the Iraq War was no longer “Bush’s war.” Instead, it was referred to in terms of “we” — and was seen as a far preferable scenario to the violence in either Afghanistan or the newly bombed Libya.
Predictably, the departure of several thousand U.S. peacekeepers from Iraq allowed the Shiite partisan Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to renege on his promises of equitable treatment for all Iraqi factions. Iran sensed the void and sent in Shiite operatives. The extremism of the Arab Spring finally reached Iraq. ISIS was the new Islamic terrorist hydra head that replaced the al-Qaeda head, which had been lopped off in Iraq during the surge.
Iraq went from “self-reliant” to being the nexus of Middle East unrest. All President Obama’s euphemisms for ISIS violence did not mask the reality of the disintegration of Iraq. WMD mysteriously reappeared as a national-security issue, but now in Assad’s Syria — and to such a degree that an anguished President Obama (“We have been very clear to the Assad regime . . . that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.”) himself threatened to bomb Assad if he dared re-employ WMD (Assad did, and we did not bomb him). No one asked how or where Assad had gained access to such plentiful chemical-weapon stocks — other than the administration’s later insistence that Syria’s use of chlorine gas did not really constitute WMD usage.
Russia? Because surely Saddam would have used them, if he had them, when he was being invaded.
Also – are the weapons Syria used high tech or low tech? Is it feasible they produced the weapons themselves?
Everything I’ve seen seems to indicated they’re low-tech and home brewed.
Right. Retaining a presence there would have been sufficient, but was not necessary to prevent ISIS’ invasion. The State Department presence I referred to would also have had this effect, for instance.
I agree that there’s a likely to be tension in Mosul; I don’t think there’s likely to be tension on the timescale of Lebanon (Mosul’s history isn’t that bad). I cannot imagine any of the actors in Mosul having the bloodthirst of Assad, even if they had an incentive, which they don’t.
The ammunition and bombs are low tech. The planes, missiles and guns are higher tech.
I believe the comment was in reference to *chemical* weapons. That’s what my specific reply was talking about.
Mine, too. The ammunition, bombs, and warheads are low tech likely Syrian things delivered by high tech likely Russian things.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.Yournaivelibertarianismcontraptionsbreaks down when exposed to the mud of reality.“Later” is a marker on the field, a reference point to re-assess.
In Fred Cole’s world, firefighters would drop their hoses and go home because their shift is up.No, the State department’s presence is how we get Benghazi. If the State Department had been able to muster a testicle in all of Foggy Bottom. they would have been nation-building while the military provided security. But that’s not the way it turns out — ever.
The State department guys who were there had booze parties and jacuzzis. And that was roughing it in Afghanistan.
Care to cite examples of your research?
Who
the Fis editing this while Cole’s precious insults stand? Make up your mind, Ricochet.Or maybe I’m just slow to get the message.
Should I just respond to everything with crap like this:
I would like to know who PERSONALLY is so hot on the ~~~~~~ trigger to redact me while Fred gets a pass. Or did one editor read Fred’s comment, and a different one read mine?
I’m going to work. Enjoy your day.
Fred, your own bolded text has been flatly contradicted multiple times over the years. They DID want us to stay, it was the Obama administration that walked away from the table over some technicalities. Go and look up one of Peter Robinson’s last interviews with Fouad Ajami on that very subject.
I saw John Bolton on Brit Hume’s show last night. He basically dismissed the whole effort, saying that the anti-ISIS forces will almost certainly win, but who cares? All this is likely to do is strengthen Iran’s leverage.
Benghazi happened in part because there were very few Americans there; there were many more Americans in Iraq even at its lowest point. I agree that it wasn’t particularly surprising that State didn’t step up and that State Dept. efforts during the war were abysmal, mostly in the sense that they weren’t doing stuff. CERP was an enormous success because giving money to soldiers who’d never run a business, had no background in economics, and such was enormously better than having the money going through State because State essentially didn’t exist in most of the country. Even if only by directly recruiting State Dept. personnel from the useful foreign affairs departments (Commerce, USTR, and Defense), it seems hard to me to believe that it is impossible for us to develop a functioning state department for the GWoT.
I am having some difficulty seeing why you are so sanguine regarding the temperament of the actors involved. During ISIS rule in Mosul somewhere in the area of half a million largely non-Sunni refugees were created, surely some will want to return will they not?
Will there be no retribution for suspected Sunni collaborators who remained? How many who return will find someone else occupying their former home? What about the role of militias Turkey has armed and is sending to Mosul?
Now what does that say regarding Erdogan’s intentions? Will the Iranian Shia militias passively accept this?
Yes.
Probably.
I apologize if it sounded like I was saying that there weren’t likely to be problems. It just seems unlikely that those problems will become multi-decade bloody affairs along the lines of Lebanon or the worst post-Ottoman genocides in the Middle East like Aleppo.
Erdogan’s a big jerk. He does all kinds of bad stuff. Turkey is still not Lebanon, nor Syria. Iran will obviously complain about mistreatment of Shias, as will the Federal government (indeed, the large scale presence of federal police and soldiers seems likely to be pretty helpful in discouraging excesses of unkindness to Shia). Iran’s not going to try to start a war against Nineveh. Protests, injustice, and a little violence are all likely, and have taken place in other jurisdictions where this sort of issue has arisen. All the major political parties in Nineveh have extensive histories of reaching across sectarian lines. There just isn’t a strong local support base for serious bloodshed and there isn’t going to be a lot of sympathy for foreign fighters murdering Iraqis.
Its complete Hyperbole and distortion that helps absolutely no one. ISIL has been in control of Mosul since 2014 and has tortured and murdered anyone with the slightest provocation of resistance. 100,000 AK-47s??? From where? Santa Putin? If they did have them, where could they possibly organize a viable attack strategy? Who would coordinate a successful takeover from the murderous regime occupying for the past two years. I say this to reinforce what immense job we have stacked for our own Military. 3 former clients are going back to that godforsaken craphole for their 4th and 5th tours!!! Meanwhile, fairy tale indulgences are being spouted off as if they were viable realities–100,000 Ak47s. I doubt if there are 100,000 homes–but sure, 10 Divisions worth of arms are just lying around the city.
We owe our Military so much better than this BS
That’s not what he wrote. He said 100,000 military-aged males with an (unspecified) number of AKs in the closet. That there are 100,000 military-aged males seems a reasonable estimate, given that this was a city of two million before ISIS rolled in. That this city would be awash in arms is also a fairly reasonable conjecture. Before ISIS rolled in there were an estimated 7,000 former military officers in the city and 103,000 other former soldiers (I’m appealing to the same source, but if you know another, tell me). So his conclusion that there’s an AK-47 for every military-age male doesn’t seem far-fetched.
My apologies for my tone. I just heard a dear friend and former client has been called back for his 5th tour and I was venting my frustration here. Uncalled for and unbecoming of a counselor. I am sorry.
I’m frustrated by this too. Very. I understand.
James:
“It seems hard to me to believe that it is impossible for us to develop a functioning state department for the GWoT.”
You speak in wishes, which I share. Yet there is no GWoT. Did you know that the military is forbidden to use the term in documents?
There is no effort to staff up to a war we are not fighting. It is officially an “Overseas Contingeny Operation”, conducted as the moral equivalent of dog catching, with the fierce urgency of Whenever.