The Coalition working out of Tikrit has retaken a couple hundred villages and towns in northern Iraq. Between human spotters and drones identifying ISIS assets, destruction of ISIS hardware has been going on steadily for months. The period from July through December has not been good for ISIS.
Now Mosul is being surrounded. Coalition troops control 270 compass degrees around Mosul.
al-Jazeera would have us think that Mosul is under grave risk of becoming another Aleppo. Half the population has fled, leaving half to be killed. But as you will see in the details, down below in the troop counts, such an outcome is practically impossible.
These guys are Kurds. This platoon was photographed during the effort to lay down a local siege to trap an ISIS unit at Sinjar. They took the town of Sinjar a day later, west of Mosul out toward the Syrian borderline.
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Note that this is more than a hundred miles west from Kurdistan. They are operating as part of a field army with logistical support under Coalition agreement:
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Apparently ISIS officers are learning something about tactics. This battle at Sinjar developed atypically as a moving front scenario that expanded over to Tal Afar. ISIS carried out a mechanized retreat under aerial strikes that preserved some fraction of their force.
2014 ended badly for ISIS. Their leader, Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri (nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi; titled as Caliph Ibrahim) was killed at al-Qa'im in early November. Their attack groups at Tikrit, Amerli and Jurf al-Sakhar were surrounded and then annihilated. The "Toyota Task Force" units that ran through from Mosul into the eastern Dyala governate were cut off and annihilated.
Sinjar is now linked up with Tikrit. On the eastern side of Mosul the main line runs Tikrit-Amerli-Kirkuk and up into Kurdistan. If ISIS is going to reinforce Mosul this winter, the logistics train out of Syria will have use soft-target trucks to traverse 300 miles of open country.
That is the overall map for control of Iraq going into 2015.
Same time, considered on a daily basis, the Coalition reports having more aerial sorties/engagement options available to pound on ISIS units than they have solid targets to go after. They have 200+ attack resources every day, that's going steadily 24/7/365. Over much of northern and western Iraq they have run out of meaningful ISIS targets.
Finding a three-car chain of suicide bombers en route toward Tikrit was the big deal for the whole of Iraq, one recent morning. Still, instead of making preparations to defend Mosul, the Islamists are using their resources to "arrest" and kill civilians and blow up old religious sites.
Al Jazeera
al-Jazeera serves as the world voice for the Sunni oil states.
News coverage for MENA and points east relies on news sources include business interests and liaison contacts to the region's intelligence services. AJ is a crown jewel of the the House of Thani, the rulers of Qatar.
Today, covering Iraq, AJ's usual we-work-for-trillionaires bravado is hard to find.
Early on al-Jazeera supported ISIS in Syria and then gushed about how well their Sunni guys were doing rolling over the Shi'ia troops in Iraq. That approach is long gone. The tone of coverage suggests that a slaughter of historical proportions is possible at Mosul
Today, Mosul is a city on death row enduring both a terrible present and the potential of a worse future... ISIL has proved to be a resilient opponent and while its march forward has been held up in Kobane, Mosul remains under the black flag.He's dreaming.In November, Deputy Governor of Mosul Nuraddin Kaplan said that "...Moves to retake Mosul are in the pipeline but I would argue that the priority should be given to the strategy of prompting a collapse from within as opposed to a destructive attempt to take it by force."
al-Jazeera adds that their sources project a Battle of Mosul that requires "some 80,000 troops to 'take' the city." From the text you would think that 80,000 soldiers will be engaged in a ground assault on ISIS positions with results approximating the Battle of Stalingrad in WW II.
Fortunately for Mosul and its residents, the 80,000 figure relates to laying a siege line around the city and its immediate suburbs. This perimeter build up will extend north and south along the Tigris.
The Coalition learned at al-Qusayr, Syria, in 2012 that these Islamist irregulars are vulnerable, all but helpless when surrounded by a force that can deploy artillery from all angles.
The big thing that AJ misses is that ISIS is down to 3,000 in the Mosul area.
That includes Tal Afar. The first wave back March-June of 2014 brought ~12,000 down to Mosul from Syria. But then the ISIS attack groups spread their raiders out as far as Dyala governate in the east and the outskirts of the city of Karbala south of Baghdad.
So what you will see is 80,000 troops laying siege to Mosul and a ground assault that will leverage 7,000 specially trained urban combat specialists.
Experienced Lebanese Hizb Allah trainers have come over to Iraq. They prepared Iraqi Security Force and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (AAH) troops for the Jurf al-Sakhar fight. Sadr has militiamen up there, too, but they will be out doing the siege tasks.
This approach worked efficiently at Jurf al-Sakhar (just north of Karbala.) A 600-man ISIS force at JaS was annihilated while taking fewer than 100 casualties.
ISIS losses are driven by mortar fire and aerial attacks. ISIS artillery gets eliminated early on by 155mm artillery fire, augmented by aerial attacks. ISIS's 20mm and 23mm anti-aircraft guns are no match for professional artillery. As of the Jurf al-Sakhar fight, ISIS still hasn't figured out using mortars. They had captured an armory with virtually unlimited numbers of mortar rounds but never managed to coordinate their light infantry with mortar fire.
So what's the bottom line ???
It's bad news for the Perpetual War Party.
Word out of the Coalition is that taking Sinjar last week is important because the the Anbar ISIS contingent is now separated from the Mosul contingent. Mosul is surrounded 270-degrees of the compass.
This is going very quickly. The remaining 90-degrees of the compass going northwest from Mosul is not safe ground for ISIS -- the Kurds at Sinjar moved a force through that area without ISIS opposition.
These Kurds mix Sunni and Shi'ia troops side by side, no problem. A lesson to the whole region. Of course that's how the Syrian army was run, prior to the Saudis bankrolling al-Nusrah, ISIS and the like to create their anti-Shi'ia rebellion. Assad's army all through the 2000s was 60:40 Sunni-to-Shi'ia.
Mosul is not going to be destroyed.
Sorry about that, al-Jazeera. ISIS has 3,000 in the region around Mosul. That puts no more than 1,200 inside the city. When they concentrate to block the sorties of a ground assault, artillery and air strikes should prove lethal. That's how Amerli and Jurf al-Sakhar went down.
There is no reason not to go in to Mosul and annihilate the ISIS force in place. The worst of what happens at Mosul is the 25,000 local people who have already been "arrested" by ISIS (from the text of the linked AJ article) and gone missing.
Our Perpetual War experts sold President Obama on the idea that ISIS was going to keep it going for 2 or 3 years. Sorry about that. It's not going to happen. ISIS is kaput in Iraq and in Syria before the end of 2015.
These experts have been wrong before. For these guys, that's every time out. It's like they try to be wrong: the Sarah Palins of geopolitics. These are the guys who still tell us that "The Surge" produced a victory. And that removing Assad in Syria is more important than taking out these psychopathic al-Qaeda clones.