In Mosul, a Hopeful Partnership
“With just 2,000 American soldiers to patrol a city of 1.8 million people — the Iraqi Sunni insurgency’s most formidable urban stronghold — the U.S. military strategy in Mosul relies to an unprecedented degree on the Iraqi security forces,” the Washington Post reports.
“U.S. military officials here say there will be nothing like the ’surge’ of thousands of American troops that helped ease the fighting in Baghdad and no major effort to search for insurgents block by block. Instead, they are betting that 18,200 Iraqi soldiers and police can shoulder the load against the kaleidoscope of insurgent groups fighting in the city.”
Maj. Adam Boyd, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment’s intelligence officer said: “We see the Iraqi security forces, more and more, take the lead and take the fight to the enemy. You do see a capability that we have not seen before.”
In recent months, three Iraqi army battalions have returned to Mosul from deployments in Baghdad. The Interior Ministry has approved 2,000 additional police recruits for the city, and a new Iraqi operations command is coordinating the efforts of the Iraqi security forces.
That’s all good news, of course, but sadly there’s also bad news:
But some Iraqi soldiers say they have neither the manpower nor the equipment to defeat the insurgency in Mosul, where violence has increased over the past six months. As of mid-February, there were 80 attacks a week, a quarter of which killed or wounded people.
Mosul’s ethnic composition poses unique challenges for the Iraqi security forces. Sunni Arabs constitute four-fifths of the population, and there is little of the sectarian violence that has caused so much bloodshed elsewhere in the country. But many residents are openly hostile to the Iraqi army forces, whose leadership in Mosul is predominantly Kurdish, viewing them as a force for Kurdish encroachment. The insurgent violence here is focused almost entirely on Iraqi and U.S. security forces. Since the new American regiment arrived in Mosul in November, its troops have encountered hundreds of roadside bombs, according to U.S. military officials.
The distrust among local residents limits the Iraqi soldiers’ ability to collect intelligence about the insurgents they are fighting. The thousands of armed Sunnis who aligned with American soldiers and provided so much information about the group al-Qaeda in Iraq in other parts of the country have failed to materialize in Mosul. Dosky said taking control of the city would require at least two new Iraqi army divisions.
But it seems that we’re seeing a coalition in Mosul right now. A coalition that might accomplish more than a major US surge in the region. Or, at the very least, it are Iraqis themselves who are doing something. That’s what, in the end, has to happen. The US can only stay for so long.
