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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 counterfactual of “if we’d made a more serious effort to keep troops” was raised. I was pointing out that this was only one of a number of counterfactuals in which ISIS would not have made the kind of impact it did. State efficiency is not the most likely of those; with a different Congress (specifically, one without a couple of Republican Senators, or one in which they made different life choices), we’d have had intervention in Syria, which would have been enough. It’s just one of a series of choices that resulted in the outcome we got.
We have a GWoT, no matter what they call it, just as we’re killing radical Islamic terrorists, no matter what they call them. I agree that there’s a great diversity of ways in which we are not stepping up to where we should be, but it nonetheless appears to me that we’re winning. The news from Iraq is good. Some of the news from Syria is good. The news from Libya is good. The news from Somalia is good. The news from Mali is good. ISIS inspires people because they are able to make a claim that they’re the caliphate that will conquer the world. An ISIS without territory is much less likely to see people using trucks to ruin parties in France or guns to mess with people’s clubbing in Florida.
In the long run. In the short run, we should expect a few attacks in the West.
Sure. Like I say that we won in Iraq long before my office was destroyed. They will carry on murdering people until there’s a consensus they’ve lost, which will take much longer for the dead enders to get to, but the numbers will drop off. Giuliani was successful, too, but we still have murders in NYC. Deng did amazing things, but there are still a bunch of poor Chinese out there. The difference between Clinton winning and someone who could snatch defeat from this point is bigger than the difference, for these purposes, than Clinton winning and a Reagan/Batman ticket winning. The hardest parts are done.