Defeats of the Islamic State are brewing in both Iraq and Syria, a top State Department official tasked with overseeing the fight against ISIS said Friday.
With the help of American advisers, a coalition of Iraqi security forces, Kurdish fighters, and tribal militias are preparing to liberate Mosul, the second-largest city in the country. Meanwhile, the Turkish military and Syrian groups are closing in on Dabiq, a town in Syria that has outsized significance for the jihadists.
“That is the name of ISIL’s propaganda magazine and they’re going to have to find a new name for their propaganda magazine, which, actually, they already have,” Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL, told reporters.
That would be a blow to ISIS propagandists. The magazine is named Dabiq because the town is believed to be the ultimate site of a final war between Muslims and Western powers.
“To reiterate the location’s importance, both the first and second editions of the magazine’s table of contents are preceded by a quote from al-Qaida in Iraq (AqI) founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, saying that ‘The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heart will continue to intensify — by Allah’s permission — until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq,’ ” as the Institute for the Study of War’s Harleen Gambhir explained. “Naming a main propaganda effort after a forecasted battle in Dabiq, Syria, implies that ISIS wants to be seen as the jihadist group that will lead the Muslim community into worldwide domination.”
Although Dabiq has symbolic value, Mosul is the focus of a massive military and political operation. McGurk and his team have been working to assemble a force of more than 30,000 fighters for the attack, and assign tasks for the various entities involved in the fight, while also preparing for as many as 1 million refugees to flee the city when it is finally liberated.
“We think the plan is coming together quite well. That said, this will be a very unpredictable, very dynamic, very uncertain operation,” McGurk said. “We will be prepared, again, for the worst case.”
Most of the Yazidis who were enslaved by ISIS before President Obama ordered airstrikes against the terrorists are in Mosul, McGurk said, adding that the morale of the jihadists is low.
“We are having increasing reports of Daesh [ISIS] terrorist fighters who are actually shooting themselves in the leg or in the arm to try to get out of the fight,” McGurk said, using another name for ISIS. “But there is a humanitarian imperative to get Daesh out of Mosul as soon as we can and we think we are rapidly approaching that day.”
McGurk wouldn’t say when the assault will happen, however. “We feel that momentum is on the side of the Iraqi security forces, but they are the ones that will set the date for when this launch is and we will support them when they’re prepared to go,” he said.
