Iraqi Army’s Offensive Against ISIS Grinding As US Accelerates Military Campaign In Iraq
Residents of Fallujah are now starving...
If we are to believe the statements of Obama administration officials about the war in Iraq, it’s just a matter of time before Islamic State will be driven out of its strongholds in Mosul and Falluja.
Defense Secretary Ash Carter said Monday during a visit to the USS Blue Ridge — the Navy’s command ship in the Asia Pacific — that the U.S. is “going to accelerate the military campaign as fast as we can.”
The Pentagon is currently drawing up recommendations about an increase of U.S. support for the Iraqi army that could include the involvement of American forces. The U.S. has currently 2,000 military personnel in Iraq.
The Pentagon is reportedly mulling to recommend to the president to send in Apache helicopters for combat missions and more Special Forces and military advisers.
The Iraqi army has begun an offensive that aims to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second city, from Islamic State. The assault on ISIS in the Mosul area was launched March 24 but has reportedly bogged down.
Islamic State conquered Mosul June 10, 2014, and at that time the city had a population of 2 million people. In the weeks after the ISIS takeover, 300,000 people fled the city, most of them Christians and Yazidis.
The Iraqi government had been planning to launch an offensive to retake the city since December, 2014 when officials said the attack was “just weeks away.”
The current offensive, however, is suffering from the same difficulties as earlier actions against Islamic State by the Iraqi army and its allies.
Despite air support and artillery fire by U.S. Marines advances have been slow, and local Sunni experts and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who are not involved in the battle think the assault could end in a bloodbath. The Kurds say that despite the state-of-the-art weapons that have been provided by the U.S., the Iraqi army is still suffering from a lack of morale.
The Sunnis in the Iraqi army are not prepared to die for the central government in Bagdad that is regarded as corrupt and an agent of the United States. The government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi is struggling with multiple problems and has to deal with an economic and cabinet crisis.
Last week it seemed that government forces finally had succeeded to deliver a new blow to Islamic State when it was reported they had liberated the city of Hit, but local media said northern and eastern parts of the city remain under the control of Islamic State.
Another offensive against ISIS in the Kasabet al-Bashir area ended in a near defeat for the Iraqi army. The government forces had to retreat and only succeeded to liberate the villages of Albu Moufarej and Mazraa west of Kasabet al-Bashir.
Meanwhile, coalition airplanes carried out strikes against Islamic State targets in Mosul, killing 67 civilians and wounding another 38.
To get a better understanding about the intensity of the fighting in Iraq one only has to look at the death tollover the period of April 6-10. During this period, 1,057 people died in Iraq as a result of the war. One of the casualties was an American Marine.
French Minister of Defense Jean-Yves Le Drian said during a visit to Bagdad on Monday that this year should become “a major turning point in our struggle against the so-called Islamic State.” He said the focus of the war effort must be the recapture of both Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq.
Today Le Drian, who visited Iraq for the first time since he became Defense Minister, bragged that “we are in the process of surrounding Mosul to prepare for battle, which will be tough.”
But one has only to look at the situation in Fallujah, ISIS’ second stronghold in Iraq, to understand that Drian’s words were mere rhetoric.
The city has been under siege for almost three months and 60,000 civilians are trapped in the city. Human rights organizations and the UN World Food Program say that aid has not reached the city since the fall of Ramadi in December. Residents of Fallujah are now starving, UNWFP said in a new report.
Islamic State has blocked the advance of Iraqi troops by planting hundreds of booby traps and roadside bombs along the roads leading to the entrances of Fallujah.
The Obama administration, meanwhile, thinks it is time to talk about the rehabilitation of Iraq and is expected to ask the Gulf States to help rebuild Iraq. President Obama is scheduled to attend the U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council Leaders’ Summit next week in Saudi Arabia, where he will push for a broad effort to rebuild Iraq once ISIS is defeated.
Islamic State is not anywhere near defeat, however. Although the organization has suffered a string of setbacks recently, it shows on a daily basis that it has no plans to surrender.
This also became apparent in Syria yesterday where ISIS launched a counter attack on Assad’s army in the area of Tadmor (Palmyra) — the city that was liberated two weeks ago — and in the border town of al-Rai in northern Syria that was seized from rival rebel groups.
ISIS also captured 10 villages in the al-Rai region and drove al-Qaeda branch Jabhat al-Nusra out of theYarmouk refugee camp in Damascus on Monday.
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