U.S. military officials are showing frustration with the snail’s pace of operations by Iraqi troops, who they feel are constantly preparing to liberate Iraqi cities, but are never quite ready to attack.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has announced a goal of retaking Mosul, the de facto capital of the Islamic State group in Iraq, by the end of this year, but U.S. military officials are noting a certain lack of urgency on the ground.
“It’s slower than sometimes we would conduct operations,” said Col. Chris Garver, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad.
Garver praised the performance of Iraqi units, even as he admitted what he called “their style of warfare” was to have a long “isolation phase.” During that time, U.S. and coalition aircraft slowly degrade Islamic State forces from the air, and then move in only after victory seems a foregone conclusion.
That’s what happened late last year in Ramadi, where U.S. advisers waited months for Iraqi forces to decide the time was right to confront the much smaller Islamic State force head-on.
“There were times that we thought they were more ready to go into Ramadi than they did at the time,” Garver said. “Eventually, they went into Ramadi after the long isolation phase and they were successful inside the city.”
The Iraqis’ reluctance to attack until the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor prolongs the suffering of civilians in cities such as Fallujah and Mosul, where local residents are subjected to the horrors of Islamic State control, and the destruction that comes from months of coalition airstrikes.
The Pentagon says Fallujah is now surrounded, but there’s no timeline for its liberation.
The slow pace of Iraqi operations also calls into question whether Mosul can realistically be liberated this year, as the Iraqi prime minister has vowed
Last month, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee he was not optimistic that Iraqi forces could retake Mosul any time soon.
“Certainly not this year,” he testified Feb. 9. “We may be able to begin the campaign, do some isolation operations around Mosul. But securing or taking Mosul is an extensive operation and not something I see in the next year or so.”
The Pentagon continues to offer the Iraqis more combat firepower from U.S. Apache attack helicopters, which are already in Iraq, but Baghdad continues to say “no thanks.”
At a Pentagon briefing this week, Defense Secretary Ash Carter indicated the U.S. would like to do much more in an effort to light a fire under the Iraqis.
“We’re talking about more of the things that we did in Ramadi, but we are talking about additional things of the kind that we’ve offered previously but that weren’t necessary in the case of Ramadi but might be helpful … as Iraqi forces move north.”
Thus far, however, Iraqis have shown little interest in departing from “the Iraqi style of warfare.”
