IS on its heels, but marines say it’s a fight to the death

Soldiers insist they hold the offensive in Iraq and Syria, but warn there’s no quit in the jihadists

Afew days ago, Capt Mike Spencer of the Marines rocketed off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in his F-18 to provide air support for Iraqi troops advancing on the dusty city of Tal Afar, one of the last Islamic State (IS) strongholds.

A busy six hours followed in the skies over Iraq. As IS fighters fired on Iraqi forces from a building, Capt Spencer dropped precision-guided munitions on them, destroying the structure and presumably killing the men inside. A short while later, he was ordered to take out another IS position nearby. He did so, and then eliminated another.

When he ran out of bombs, Capt Spencer headed back to the Nimitz.

The Risk board that is the map of Iraq may show almost certain defeat for the IS as its territory continues to shrink, but US officials say the pace of the fight is not slowing. The aircraft carrier Nimitz, where Capt Spencer commands a Marine squadron, is launching as many sorties and strikes against IS targets in Iraq and Syria as other US aircraft carriers were doing three years ago, after then-president Barack Obama opened the bombing campaign.

The militants have lost a long list of cities and towns in Iraq — Baqouba, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul and now Tal Afar — and are under attack from all sides in Raqqa, their self-proclaimed capital in Syria. But one would never know it from the way the extremists have continued to fight, US soldiers and Marines say.

“We definitely have the offensive,” Capt Spencer said. But, he added, “they have resigned themselves that they’re going to fight to the bitter end, and they are going to take as many of us with them as possible”.

From Raqqa to Mosul to Nangarhar province in Afghanistan, the presumed victors in the war against the IS paint a picture of an insurgency that has not yet seemed to realise that it is on its heels. The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, on Thursday cast the fight in stark terms. “Wherever you are, we are coming for liberation, and you have no option but to surrender or die,” he said.

While small numbers of fighters are surrendering, many more are dying. Lt Gen Stephen Townsend, the US commander of the war effort against the IS in Iraq and Syria, said the final days of combat this summer in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, resembled the worst fighting he had witnessed in 35 years.

“They’re fighting like a conventional army fights,” said Maj Jarrod Devore, another Marine stationed on the Nimitz.

Once US-backed troops move on, the militants often return, no matter how intense the bombing campaign had been. The case of what is known as the Mother of All Bombs (MOAB) illustrates the militants’ determination.

On April 13, Gen John Nicholson, US commander of the war effort in Afghanistan, ordered forces to drop the huge weapon, the most powerful conventional bomb in the US arsenal, on an IS cave complex in the Achin district of Nangarhar, a remote area of eastern Afghanistan. The weapon is so large that it had to be dropped from the back of a cargo plane.

The local Afghan troops did not want to take on the fierce IS fighters themselves, US advisers at Gamberi said. In March, the 201st Corps had lost 16 men in one night in a fight against the IS. “They did not have the appetite to go into southern Nangarhar and fight Daesh,” said Maj Richard Anderson, a US operations adviser to the 201st Corps, using an Arabic acronym for the IS.

The Afghan soldiers’ happiness at the dropping of the bomb soon changed to annoyance when the US advisers told them that they would have to go into the province and “hold” areas to prevent IS fighters from coming back. At first, the Afghans balked.

“We kept telling them, there is no US ‘hold’,” Maj Anderson said in an Aug 21 interview at Gamberi. “They didn’t understand that. They said: ‘You dropped the MOAB. Why don’t you just drop another MOAB?’”

Eventually, the Afghan soldiers deployed into some of the areas in Nangarhar province that had been cleared by US and Afghan special operations forces.

The fighting is still intense. The tunnel complex where the giant bomb was dropped has not remained clear. While the bomb did initially clear the area of IS fighters, many have returned. “They’re already proving they’re willing to go back into the area where the MOAB dropped,” Maj Anderson said. “They’re there today.”