Offensive on Raqa ‘more complex than Mosul’

BRUSSELS: As Iraqi forces backed by a US-led coalition inch toward Daesh in Mosul, experts and security sources warn that any assault on the terrorists’ main Syrian stronghold of Raqa would be even more difficult.

The US and British defense ministers said on Wednesday they expected an assault to drive Daesh from its de facto capital of Raqa to begin in the next few weeks.

If Mosul falls, Raqa will be the only major city in either Syria or Iraq under Daesh control, the vestige of a cross-border “caliphate” the terrorists declared after seizing large parts of both countries in mid-2014.

Pleased with progress in the Iraq offensive, military chiefs are talking about overlapping operations in Raqa, though there is still a great deal of caution.

US Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander of the coalition supporting Iraqi forces and Kurdish peshmerga units in the fight against Daesh, acknowledged Syria was “a very complicated battle space”.

“There are a lot of regional security concerns that are in competition there... the Syrian regime’s involved, the Russians are involved, Turkey’s involved. It’s hard,” Townsend told reporters Wednesday.

A French source acknowledged that the Syrian side of the fight against Daesh was “much more complex,” saying “obviously not everything is in place to take Raqa tomorrow.”

The Lebanese newspaper L’Orient le Jour put it starkly in a comment piece this week, saying that “compared to the Syrian crisis, the Iraqi problem is practically child’s play”.

The offensive on Mosul, which began on Oct. 17, was more than a year in the planning, with the coalition, Baghdad and authorities in autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan all taking part.

That operation has its own complications, namely over the role of Iraq’s powerful Shiite militias and of Turkey, which considers Sunnimajority Mosul to be part of its natural sphere of influence.

But an operation in Syria — theatre of a proxy battle royale among the great powers — would be even more difficult.

In practical terms there is also the question of who would wage the offensive in a country ravaged by a bloody five-year civil war and broken up by myriad groups all fighting each other.