In the game of “whack-a-mole” that represents the counter-insurgency operation in Iraq over the last 13 years, the prospect of re-capturing Mosul from the Islamic State is something of a milestone. The reason why it is so important is that ISIS will have effectively lost its claim to holding any cities in Iraq – the country where their story began. With victory now in sight, I thought I’d take a look back at what I wrote last year about Mosul, with a view to taking stock on the current state of play against ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
In late May of 2016, the anti-ISIS offensive on Fallujah was at its height, and some commentators were discussing whether Mosul or Al-Raqqa would be next to fall. At the time, I speculated that as long as the conflict between Syrian Armed Forces and non-ISIS actors persisted – and the international approach remained disjointed – Mosul would next. Some nine months later that has proved correct. Later that same month, I also mused that taking Mosul would require overcoming certain psychological hurdles: namely that because the city fell so easily to ISIS in 2014, its capture had afforded the terrorist group a certain military prowess. I felt that battle-hardening in Fallujah would prove to be the most effective remedy.
Not only has Fallujah replenished Iraqi military morale, but it has helped to solidify their tactics: the approach adopted for the siege of Mosul has been taken straight from the textbook of Fallujah and Ramadi. In practice, this means a creeping period of peripheral skirmishes; the massing of various militia groups; setting up of roadblocks and cutting off of supply lines into the city; encouraging the displacement of residents; and psychological operations across the media – showcasing the potential brutality of Iraqi forces (whether real or not, remains to be seen).
Nevertheless retaking Mosul has proved more complex than either Fallujah or Ramadi by at least a whole order-of-magnitude. Instead of sitting along a main road in a flat, sparsely inhabited region, Mosul is a densely populated, sprawling urban centre in the highlands of the country. Instead of homogenous tribal-religious affiliations in the host population, Mosul has a broad mixture of inhabitants. Like other ancient, continuously inhabited cities in the general region, Mosul has experienced plenty of warfare and sieges down the centuries. This has come to define the city as ‘defensible’ in a way that places such as Ramadi and Fallujah – that are mainly comprised of 20th century buildings and city plans – are not.
This has also been demonstrated in the timeline: while the liberation of Ramadi and Fallujah was in the order of a couple of months; the siege of Mosul has been ongoing now for almost half a year.
So what is next?
Once Mosul falls, Iraq will have denied ISIS its control of territory, which will force the group back into a disenfranchised position. This will be to at least the level prior to the ISIS ‘surge’ in Iraq of 2014. Such a defeat for ISIS cannot easily be recovered; the zeitgeist of global support for ISIS appears to have waned with its fortunes, the strength of call to their jihad grows weaker with each set-back. Although the writing may be on the wall for ISIS as a state/caliphate, the prospect that Iraq will be freed from the spectre of terrorism from extremist Sunni groups is, however, non-existent. All the same, Iraq will have moved a big step further in the right direction, and once again the state can claim the monopoly on violence within the country’s borders – a necessary condition for bona fide statehood. That is the national picture.
On the local level, the population of Mosul will start to rebuild, and they will look for effective governance and the rule of law – both of which must fill the void as swiftly as possible, as otherwise further tragedy could unfold. In terms of relocation of demographics, both Yazidis and Christians have experienced wholesale ethnic cleansing from the area; and both groups are also under political pressure not to return. Even President Erdogan has apparently stated that “only Sunni Arabs, Turkomens, and Sunni Kurds” should be permitted to remain in the city following liberation (http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/10/turkey-iraq-squabble-threat-mosul-campaign-isis.html). Thus the status of Yazidis and Christians as political refugees may well persist following the fall the city.
From a global perspective, the defeat of ISIS in Mosul will shift the nature of counter-ISIS operations in Iraq back to the familiar – yet unwelcome – patterns of 2003-2014. The absence of a land-war in Iraq requiring intensive air-support operations will also place considerable pressure on the U.S-led coalition to put together a workable game-plan for Syria. Although continually stopping-and-starting, peace-talks in Syria have been more intensive than they have been previously. The new U.S. President is also keen to make substantive headway against ISIS as an early policy objective. The combination of these factors raises the probability in my mind that ISIS could be routed from Al-Raqqa before the year is out.
https://datesandfigs.net/2016/05/23/recapturing-fallujah- again/
Dates & Figs 