Retaking Mosul

  “My answer would be .  .  . I’m not going to tell you. Yes?”

Under the command  of Barack Obama, the traditional idea that “loose lips sink ships” has gone out of fashion. In mid-February, anonymous officials from U.S. Central Command told reporters of a coming assault to wrest Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from the grip of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. ISIS has held Mosul, which had nearly two million residents, since June 2014.

The announcement was a surprise to new defense secretary Ashton Carter and to the White House. It was also disturbing to many in Congress; senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham complained to the president about the leak of the detailed campaign plan, writing: “Never in our memory can we recall an instance in which our military has knowingly briefed our war plans to our enemies.” 

The leak was also a shock to Iraqis. While the retaking of Mosul has long been a topic of conversation in Baghdad, and the government of Haider al-Abadi is said to be eager to take the offensive as soon as possible, to have the Americans put a date on the calendar—the CENTCOM briefing said the attacks would begin in April or May—is to write a check the Iraqis may not be able to cash. And the stakes, both politically and militarily, for the Obama administration as well as Abadi, could hardly be greater. 

The response of the Kurdish leadership to the leak is illustrative. Asked by NPR if the Iraqi Army was ready to undertake the Mosul assault, Masrour Barzani, head of the Kurdish national security council, said, “I wish I could tell you they are ready, but they are not.” He continued,

Even discounting Kurdish special pleading from this assessment, Barzani’s points are well taken. Looked at from a distance—and one can never see Iraq too clearly from Washington—military failure in Mosul is very much an option.

Any assessment of the Mosul campaign’s prospects must begin by remembering some of the basic facts about the city. It’s physically big—roughly the size of Washington, D.C., inside the Beltway—as well as populous, making it very difficult urban terrain. The city’s also split more or less in half by the Tigris River, which creates a formidable line of defense. 

In particular, the river forms a defense of the southwest section of the city, which is the stronghold of the Sunni population. Sunnis are a 70-percent majority of the population; Kurds account for about 25 percent; and the remaining 5 percent includes a congeries of minorities—but very, very few Shiite Iraqis. Mosul was once the retirement community for Saddam Hussein’s officer corps—tens of thousands of them. It was the nucleus of Baathist and then broader Sunni resistance to the Shiite-led governments installed in Baghdad after the 2003 invasion and under former prime minister Nuri al-Maliki. It was also a hotbed of activity for Abu Musab al Zarqawi’s Al Qaeda in Iraq, a precursor to ISIS.

The Kurds want little to do with the fight for this part of Mosul. They’ve secured the Kurdish parts of the eastern city and have had to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees from Mosul into Kurdistan proper. “[Kurdish] Peshmerga [militia] will not enter alone,” says Barzani. Not only would this create “some political sensitivity,” he admits, but he’s also aware of the limitations of the pesh, who lack the strength, weaponry, and logistics for such a mission.

And so it will fall to the few reconstructed elements of the Iraqi Army to crack the hardest nut. According to the battle-plan leaks, the Iraqi Army will put five brigades—maybe 10,000 troops total—into the operation, with just two of those conducting the initial attacks. Even if the shake-and-bake retraining effort begun last year is as successful as possible, these are not happy numbers. Many of the Iraqi “successes” trumpeted in recent months have been achieved by Shiite militias with varying degrees of Iranian support; that’s not a recipe that will work in Mosul. Indeed, to the degree that the operation is perceived as a Shiite attack on a Sunni city—which is how ISIS will portray it—resistance will stiffen.

The leaks also revealed that U.S. Central Command is uncertain “what is the final enemy disposition in Mosul.” Intelligence estimates are that ISIS strength is anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000. That’s more or less the enemy order of battle in the second battle for Fallujah in 2004, Operation Phantom Fury, conducted by 6,500 Marines and 1,500 U.S. Army soldiers with about 2,000 Navy personnel in support, a battalion of the British Army’s Black Watch, and several thousand handpicked Iraqi forces. Second Fallujah was the bloodiest engagement of that war, costing 95 American lives. And that second battle in Fallujah had to be fought because the first attack was short-circuited by faint hearts in Baghdad and Washington. At this point, underestimating the tenacity or capacity of the ISIS “JV team” would be criminal. To be sure, ISIS has had a tough time governing and running Mosul since it fell into their hands, but they’ve had plenty of time to supply and fortify a citadel. And given how central the idea of the “caliphate”—that is, territory held—is to the ISIS mystique, prudent planning would presuppose that they’ll stand and fight, bitterly.

The isolation of Mosul has already begun; Kurdish forces have accomplished that on the east side and at the crossroads town of Kiske, about 25 miles west of the city, roughly halfway to Tal Afar. It’s far from clear how much this latter effort will really cut off ISIS forces in the city, for the western approaches to Mosul are entirely open country. That’s ideal for employing U.S. airpower, but a complete cutoff would require constant patrols and a lot of aircraft. And the city’s developed limits stretch west five miles and more from the Tigris. One of the rationales advanced for the CENTCOM leaking was that it would contribute to the psychological isolation of ISIS in Mosul. This is, after all, an administration that takes the battle for the Twitterverse to be more critical than any physical battlefield.

If there’s one group of hearts and minds worth fighting for, it’s the Moslawis. Even if an estimated 500,000 of them have fled, a million or more are still living in the midst of what will soon be a bloody battlefield. How they respond to the coming mayhem may go a long way to determining the outcome. Rasha al Aqeedi, born in Mosul but living in Dubai, describes what life in the city has been like in recent months in an empathetic essay published in the American Interest: The population anticipates “the joy of ridding Mosul of ISIS” but is terrified at the prospect of “retribution and revenge by the Iraqi army, the peshmerga, or the Shia militias, which have infiltrated the volunteer fighters.” She quotes “Abu Ahmed,” a retired accountant, saying: “I wish the U.S. Army would free us instead. .  .  . We are on death row simply awaiting the day of execution.”

That day must come sometime this spring. Having announced that the attack will take place in April or May, it will be difficult to postpone too long the day of reckoning. This might have been the moment for the Obama administration to exercise some of that “strategic patience”—or at least “operational patience”—it’s so proud of, but instead it’s putting pressure on a fragile government in Baghdad that might not survive defeat.

The administration is also putting a lot of pressure on itself. To have any hope of success, the tiny Iraqi assault force will need lots of U.S. firepower. We cannot bomb Mosul in order to save it, and it’s too big for the “Kobane treatment.” That means American tactical air controllers will have to be embedded in Iraqi ground maneuver units, with enough U.S. foot soldiers to defend them. It’s getting to be boots-on-the-ground time.

President Obama has never met a red line he couldn’t walk away from. Backing down from ISIS would be very bad, and allowing the status quo in Mosul to continue would be worse. But a defeat in Mosul at the hands of ISIS would be truly catastrophic. President Obama has to get in it to win it, at least this once.

Thomas Donnelly is co-director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.