Retaking Mosul from Isis gathering pace
ISLAMIC State (Isis) is facing military defeat in one of its last strongholds in Mosul as the military coalition, led by the Iraqi government, announces its assault on the western part of the city following its successful defeat of the Islamists in eastern Mosul.
“We announce the start of a new phase in the operation. We are coming to Nineveh to liberate the western side of Mosul,” Prime Minister Haider Al Abadi said on television on Sunday.
The media reported that Iraqi forces had seized 17 villages from Isis as they advanced from several directions towards Mosul airport the same day.
Analysts say it is only a matter of time before the coalition retakes all of Mosul, despite predicting that the final fight will be bloody and difficult as Isis puts up fierce resistance, including booby-trapping buildings, launching repeated suicide attacks, embedding among the city’s civilian population and using residents as human shields.
But many questions have been raised as to what the situation on the ground in Mosul will be once Isis is defeated. Of even more importance will be the fate of the approximately 750 000 civilians still trapped in west Mosul.
“We are racing against the clock to prepare emergency sites south of Mosul to receive displaced families,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq.
The coalition fighting for Mosul includes Kurdish Pershmerga and Turkomen soldiers, supported by Turkish military advisers, Shia militias and police federal units fighting as part of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, and the 15th and 16th division of the Iraqi army supported by the Iraqi Air Aorce.
American, British, Canadian and French advisers on the ground are advising the coalition, which is also supported by airstrikes carried out by their air forces.
The coalition is a volatile mixture, including several countries with competing geopolitical interests and ideologies – reflected in their respective support of various proxy militias, and Sunni and Shia Iraqi soldiers and militia members with a bloody history of sectarian divide.
“Should the Islamic State lose its entire territorial base and revert to its pre-2014 status as an insurgent movement, the consequences would be profound, though much would in fact depend on the circumstances of its downfall, and particularly on the identity of those who deprived it of its status as a state,” says Mark Heller from Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies.
As long as a sense of Sunni grievance and deprivation persists and Isis continues to embody the cause of Sunni deprivations, Isis will continue to enjoy significant support from Sunni constituencies irrespective of its depraved cruelty, he says