Kurds
Assault ISIS in Sinjar, With Eyes on Mosul
BY PAUL
MCLEARYNOVEMBER 12, 2015 - 6:03 PM
Thousands of Kurdish
forces poured down Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq Thursday for an
all-out assault on the Islamic State, the first offensive in the
long-awaited push to reclaim the key city of Mosul from the
militants.
American and Iraqi
officials have said for the past year that Mosul is the ultimate
prize in the effort to push the Islamic State out of Iraq, but plans
to move against the city have been complicated by the subsequent fall
of Fallujah and Ramadi. The effort has been slowed even further by
the need to to rebuild the Iraqi army, which saw tens of thousands of
its soldiers flee Mosul when ISIS advanced on the city in June 2014.
The delay has given the militants time to build what U.S. officials
have described as vast fields of landmines and deeply entrenched
defensive positions scattered throughout the densely populated city
of 1.5 million.
In a sign of the
importance of the fight, American military officials said that U.S.
Special Operations forces have taken up positions on Sinjar mountain
to help coordinate airstrikes with Kurdish peshmerga forces, with
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook saying Thursday that some of the
advisors might be close enough to the fighting “to visibly see”
their targets. He insisted, though, that the Americans were remaining
behind the front lines.
The offensive, which
involves 7,500 peshmerga troops along with local Kurd and Yazidi
forces, has already pushed Islamic State forces out of several
villages south and west of Sinjar, and Kurdish forces have reported
that some of the militants are on the run. The U.S.-led coalition
battling the Islamic State pounded the area around Sinjar with at
least 36 airstrikes on Thursday.
The area around
Sinjar is an alluring target in the effort to isolate Mosul in
preparation for the Iraqi army’s eventual push to retake the city.
Kurdish forces have already set up defensive lines to the north and
east of Mosul, but approaches to the south and west remain open,
giving the Islamic State ways of shipping weapons, fighters, and food
into the city.
But the new
offensive has retaken key parts of Highway 47, which is a major enemy
supply route between the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Raqqa,
Syria, and Mosul. The Kurdish government tweeted Thursday that
“Sinjar now isolated from Tal Afar and Syria.”
Hitting the Islamic
State in one area, such as Sinjar, in order to pressure the Islamic
State in another, like Mosul, has been a tactic that American
military planners have talked about for the past several weeks. Late
last month, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Col. Steve
Warren, said that rather than looking at Iraq and Syria as separate
conflicts, “we’re now looking at ISIL as the fight, whether
they’re in Iraq or Syria.”
“Pressure on Raqqa
will relieve some of the pressure, will relieve some of the enemy
influence, we believe, in Mosul,” he said.
The U.S. has started
supplying and advising Arab forces operating outside the de facto
capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, and in the
coming weeks, 50 American commandos will embed themselves with Syrian
fighters in order to coordinate their efforts to push against the
city.
Warren said that
assault would “be one of the keys that unlocks the entire ISIL
enterprise, which will then get us into Mosul.”
Highway 47, then, is
a key prize, as it has been a major supply route for Iraqi oil and
crops that have been shipped to supply Raqqa. Analysts warn, however,
that taking the highway isn’t going to make the eventual assault on
Mosul any easier.
The Islamic State
“has already built roads that sit south of the highway, so they
have other routes” to move in and out of the country, said
Christine van den Toorn, a researcher who directs the Institute for
Regional and International Studies at the American University of Iraq
in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya.
For months, Kurdish
forces have had the highway “within eyesight,” said Patrick
Martin of the Institute for the Study of War, “so shutting down the
road won’t totally change how they send supplies and fighters back
and forth between Raqqa and Mosul.”
But what is
important is the ground that is taken away from the militants in this
latest offensive, and the route that it opens up to Mosul. “Taking
back southern Sinjar could be the start of a larger operation,” van
den Toorn said. “Taking Sinjar and moving east to Tal Afar and then
up to Mosul” would be the most obvious plan, she added.
Even if the road
from Sinjar eventually leads to Mosul, the effort to hold the ground
around the mountain will be no easy task. Local Kurd and Yazidi
forces had been pushing toward highway 47 for some time, and the
peshmerga only just arrived to assert their primacy, van den Toorn
said. “When ISIS is gone, that’s when things are going to really
get tough. You’ve got all of these forces and they all want power
and control out there. You’re going to see this drawn out political
struggle among the Kurdish factions after ISIS is gone.”
Photo Credit: SAFIN
HAMED/AFP/Getty Images
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