By ERIC SCHMITTDEC. 8, 2014
MANAMA, Bahrain — Allied warplanes and Iraqi ground troops are increasingly isolating Islamic State militants in the captured city of Mosul, prompting Iraqi officials to push for a winter offensive to wrest control of the area months ahead of the previous schedule — and over American warnings.
The ground campaign to retake Iraq’s second-largest city from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, is still most likely many weeks away, American officials said. Its timing will depend on the pace of training for additional Iraqi ground troops to retake the city and for a holding force afterward, as well as sorting out a brewing dispute between Baghdad and Washington over whether Iraq is ready to carry out such a complex urban battle.
The United States and its coalition partners have carried out more than 660 airstrikes in Iraq, making it more difficult for the Islamic State to mass large numbers of forces or to travel in convoys. These attacks, including air raids in the past few days and Iraqi ground operations in the north and west, have made it more difficult for the Islamic State to resupply and reinforce its fighters in Mosul, which ISIS seized in June when it swept in from Syria and made its headquarters in Iraq.
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Areas Under ISIS Control
A visual guide to the crisis in Iraq and Syria.
But there is no indication that the militants have lost their fighting spirit, and there are still thousands of them. At least several hundred fighters are in and around Mosul, according to an American intelligence official.
Even if Iraqi forces oust the Islamic State from their territory, the strategy would do nothing to deal with the militant group’s safe haven in Syria. A successful campaign to counter the Islamic State in Iraq might actually exacerbate the situation across the border if militants from Mosul and elsewhere simply return to Syria, where the Obama administration’s plan to train and equip moderate rebels is lagging.
Any military campaign to retake Mosul in early 2015 would also push closer a decision by President Obama on whether scores of United States military advisers should leave the relative safety of the command posts in Iraq, where they work now, to join Iraqi and Kurdish forces on the front lines of a challenging urban fight.
The United States currently does not plan to advise Iraqi forces below the level of a brigade, which in the Iraqi Army usually has about 2,000 troops. It is also unclear under what circumstances the White House might allow American advisers to accompany Iraqi units onto the battlefield or to call in airstrikes, as Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has indicated might be necessary. Relatively small numbers of American Special Forces, or Green Berets, worked alongside allied Afghan militia units in 2001 to successfully rout the Taliban army, and Qaeda leaders living there as Taliban guests, in the early months of that war.
“I’m not predicting at this point that I would recommend that those forces in Mosul and along the border would need to be accompanied by U.S. forces but we’re certainly considering it,” General Dempsey said at a House hearing last month.
American and Iraqi officials had previously confirmed that planning was underway for a broad military campaign to dislodge the Islamic State from Iraq to begin in the spring. But these new indications of an offensive for Mosul early in the year show that pieces of the effort could be underway sooner than previously thought.
Allied warplanes and armed drones have carried out more than 30 airstrikes near Mosul in the past two weeks. The strikes have damaged or destroyed enemy bunkers, artillery, combat vehicles and even bulldozers erecting earthen fortifications, and killed several top Islamic State leaders, officials said.
“We have to beat ISIS in Mosul,” Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s finance minister and a former foreign minister, said at a security conference here on Friday.
Retaking Mosul would likely involve bloody, block-by-block fighting, based on previous urban campaigns in Iraq, like Falluja in 2004, American officials say. Success in Mosul would depend largely on the ability of the new Shiite-led Iraqi government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to win the cooperation of the local police, many of whom are Sunnis, as well as Kurdish fighters and Sunni tribesmen.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in Mosul. It is difficult terrain,” Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the Pentagon’s Central Command, said in October. “So we want to make sure that when we take that on, that we have the adequate capability and we’ve set the conditions right to get things done.”
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Video by Emily B. Hager on December 1, 2014. Photo by Karim Sahib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
General Austin, a former top allied commander in Iraq, added, “Certainly it will be an important fight and a difficult fight.”
USA Today last week reported some elements of a possible accelerated Iraqi offensive.
On the heels of a string of military victories, including breaking the siege of an oil refinery in Baiji, and the liberation of Jurf al-Sahkar, southwest of Baghdad, and Jalawla and Sadiya, in Diyala Province, some newly confident Iraqi officials have been pressing the Americans to back a major operation in Mosul sooner than they would like.
Among the Iraqis advocating for an offensive soon in Mosul are some officials close to the prime minister, as well as high-level officials in the Ministry of Defense.
American officials in Baghdad, however, have stressed that the Iraqi military lacks the necessary combat power and logistical capacity, noting that the initial Iraqi force the United States is now advising will consist of only nine Iraqi brigades and three similar Kurdish pesh merga units, or roughly 24,000 troops. The Iraqi spring offensive had called for at least doubling that force before mounting the assault.
Moreover, American officials say there are not enough local Sunni forces to hold the territory in Mosul once it is cleared by the security forces.
Instead, the Americans are urging the Iraqis to push forward with a plan to raise National Guard units, which would be composed of local forces. But Parliament has yet to take up a draft bill in the face of opposition from some Shiite leaders, and there is a growing sense that the effort is likely to be stalled for some time.
As the Iraqi security forces, along with Kurdish pesh merga units and Shiite militias aligned with Iran, rack up victories, there are growing calls to allow these fighters to move on Sunni-dominated areas such as Mosul and Tikrit. The Americans have opposed such a move because they worry it will deepen sectarian divisions and perhaps set off a Sunni-Shiite civil war.
Hadi al-Ameri, an Iraqi lawmaker and the head of the Badr Corps, a Shiite militia with close links to Iran that has been crucial in the recent victories, complained in a recent interview that the United States and its coalition partners “don’t want the people of Iraq to liberate Iraq.”
Mosul residents and Iraqi security officials who monitor the city say that the Islamic State has largely failed to provide civilian services like electricity and potable water, angering even residents who cheered the militants’ arrival in June.
But few see local residents rising up against the group because of how effectively ISIS has chased out, destroyed or co-opted other armed elements in the city, and especially anyone tied to the government in Baghdad.
Many in Mosul still harbor deep distrust of the Iraqi Army and its cooperation with Shiite militias. They say that ISIS has so thoroughly mixed its fighters in with the city’s civilian population that any effort to push them out could lead to a protracted guerrilla campaign that could endanger residents.
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