Iraq's Struggling Mosul Offensive

Seth J. Frantzman

Security, Iraq, Kurdistan

What was supposed to be an easy operation breaks down under bad morale, bad weather and bad politics.

On March 24 the U.S. Marine Corps published photos on Facebook of its Task Force Spartan “rain[ing] steel on ISIS.” Photos showed a howitzer near Fire Base Bell near the town of Makhmur, firing at ISIS positions. Under this umbrella, a brigade of the Iraqi army was supposed to advance into six villages to begin the first stage of an operation whose goal was the liberation of Mosul, around sixty miles to the north.

According to a senior Iraqi source close to the operation, this was supposed to be a relatively easy maneuver to capture the town of Qayyara on the Tigris river. From there the army could move north towards Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, which has been controlled by Islamic State since June 2014. “The Iraqi army planned this because they want to change their face in front of the people and show an achievement to change the perception of failure into something good,” said the Iraqi source in a phone conversation this week.

The problem is that the main forces in the area of Makhmur are Kurdish peshmerga, part of the two-hundred-thousand-strong Kurdish forces who have been the most effective fighters against ISIS in the last two years. While the Kurds have pushed ISIS back from Kirkuk, and reconquered areas around Sinjar, liberating towns and villages, the Iraqi army has had to be rebuilt after it suffered humiliating defeats in 2014. When Iraq’s army retreated from Mosul in 2014 it abandoned many heavy weapons, and ISIS captured 2,300 U.S.-supplied Humvees as it overran numerous formations and bases.

Although both the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the autonomous region in northern Iraq, and Iraq’s central government, have been fighting ISIS, the two fighting forces do not fight side by side. Add to this the fact that Mosul is a Sunni Arab stronghold and the reason it feel so easily to ISIS was due to Sunni resentment of the Shia then prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Since last year a Sunni militia called Hashd al-Watani has been training with Turkish advisors at a base in the KRG. The Kurds would like to see a moderate Sunni Arab force re-take Mosul. Iraq’s central government relies heavily on Shia militias, such as the Hashd al-Sha’abi in its war on ISIS. Sunni parliamentarians such as Osama Nujaifi have repeatedly warned that Shia militias must not play a role in operations to liberate Mosul.