U.S., Iraq plan battle for Mosul

Recent gains against the Islamic State (IS) in eastern Syria have helped sever critical supply lines to Iraq and set the stage for what will be the biggest fight yet against the Sunni militancy, the battle to retake Mosul, Pentagon officials said Monday.

Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference that U.S.-backed forces had begun laying the groundwork for the fight by moving to isolate Mosul from the IS’s de facto headquarters in Raqqa, Syria. Kurdish and Arab forces retook the town of Shaddadi in eastern Syria last week, cutting off what Defense Secretary Ash Carter called the last major artery between Raqqa and Mosul.

But military officials cautioned that the fight for Mosul could last many months.

In addition to the advances in eastern Syria, the Pentagon has begun using cyber-attacks on IS communications between Raqqa and Mosul, as well as attacks meant to disrupt the militant group’s ability to use social media to recruit fighters, officials said.

Retaking Mosul would be a “massive hit” to the IS, said Patrick Martin, an Iraq expert at the Institute for the Study of War. Such a loss would bolster claims by the U.S.-led coalition that the Sunni militancy is on the run in Iraq. It could also sharply demoralise IS fighters, raising questions about whether the group could still credibly call itself a caliphate.

The Pentagon has declined to predict when Iraqi troops will try to enter Mosul, though Gen. Dunford said on Monday that “it is not something that will happen in the deep, deep future”. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq said two weeks ago that Iraqi forces would start a full military operation to retake the city as early as March.

The long fight by Iraqi security forces to take back Ramadi from the IS, which concluded in December, offers a preview of the battle to come over Mosul. Advancing inch by inch, Iraqi forces, backed by U.S. airstrikes, took more than five months to gain control of the city centre of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. As difficult as that battle was, the fight for Mosul will be much harder, military officials say. The city is five times as large as Ramadi.

Military officials also say it is hard to imagine how the fight for Mosul can be waged without close U.S. air support, which would probably require attack helicopters, something Prime Minister Abadi, for political reasons, has yet to agree to.

The effort is likely to include Kurdish peshmerga fighters, Pentagon officials say. The U.S. military has trained some 16,000 Kurdish fighters, but their participation is likely to come with its own problems. Mr. Abadi’s government is unlikely to want the Kurdish fighters to assume the lead role in the coming fight, a role that Iraq experts say is likely to be filled by the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces.

In 2004, it took more than 13,000 highly trained troops, primarily Americans, almost two months to retake and clear Fallujah of about 3,000 insurgents in the fiercest fight of the Iraq war. Ninety-five U.S. service members died, and more than 560 were wounded.

The battle for Mosul, many military experts say, could be much worse. Pentagon officials say they are unsure how many IS militants are in the city, but they have been there for almost two years.