Faced with almost certain defeat, some senior Islamic State leaders are slipping out of Mosul as Iraqi and Kurdish forces close in on the city. Foreign fighters who can’t blend in to the local population have little choice but to stay and fight, the U.S. general in command of ground forces said Wednesday.
“We’ve got indications that leaders have left. A lot of foreign fighters we expect will stay because they’re not gonna be able to exfiltrate as easily as some of the local fighters or the local leadership,” Maj. Gen. Gary Volesky, the 101st Airborne Division Commander, told reporters at the Pentagon in a briefing piped in from Baghdad.
“What we’ve seen is when foreign fighters try to leave with displaced people, the Iraqis through their screening process they see them,” Volesky said. “We don’t expect that they are going to be able to come out through a screening area. They weren’t able to do that in Fallujah. There were a number who dressed up as women. That didn’t work for them.”
Volesky says the decision of Islamic State leaders to desert their troops follows a pattern that the U.S. has seen in other Islamic State-controlled cities that fell to Iraqi forces, such as Ramadi and Fallujah.
“We’re telling Daesh [the Islamic State] that their leaders are abandoning them. We’ve seen the movement out of Mosul,” Volesky said. “Where they are going, I will leave that to our targeteers.”
Volesky, who commanded U.S. troops in Iraq during three tours in 2004, 2007 and 2009, said the same thing happened when al Qaeda leaders were targeted.
“We struck their leadership, and pretty soon their leaders started leaving, and that exodus of leaders started to break the confidence of the fighters that were remaining in Iraq.”
While Iraqi forces are moving on Mosul from the south, and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are closing in from the east, the Islamic State still controls the main road out of the city to the west.
It is not known if Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is among those who have left Mosul, but Volesky noted the Islamic State leader has vowed to create an underground insurgency.
“The enemy knows they’re losing. I mean, Baghdadi has said as much, you know, ‘We’ll go back out to the desert where we’ve traditionally been and wait.’ Well, he’ll get the opportunity to do that here in the next period of time,” Volesky said.
After the Islamic State loses Mosul, Volesky and others have predicted that the Islamic State will resort to high-profile, spectacular attacks to divert attention from their losses.
“We’ve seen them do that before. When they lose terrain in Iraq, they try to do a spectacular attack to tell everybody, you know, they’re still a relevant organization.”
Volesky said Iraq has a plan to secure its borders and go after the Islamic State after the liberation of Mosul, but provided no details of the strategy.
