Thousands dead in eight-month brutal battle but can peace last?
Tension still lingers as ISIS are finally driven from Mosul
and at least five years before it can look like it is being rebuilt. The operation to clear it of bombs will take six months and cost £5million.
But the ISIS caliphate dream, stretching from Iraq, across Syria, into Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East, is dwindling. Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead and ISIS is imploding. Here in Mosul, the city’s warweary residents – most of whom lost relatives and friends to ISIS’s horrific reign of beheadings, rape and torture – are free. But only to a degree. I have witnessed this kind of victory before in the region. The relief that it is all over will not last as those who lived the horror remember the detail.
There will be the inevitable violent reprisals against collaborators by civilians and, frankly, corrupt and often murderous police officers.
INFLUENCE
And the tension in the region will go on. Iranian-backed Shia militia and Revolutionary Guard Corps troops who also fought for Mosul are extensions of Tehran’s increasing influence across Iraq and Syria. Kurdish forces who fought valiantly to smash ISIS’s eastern Mosul defences want to extend Kurdish influence in northern Iraq. Neighbouring Turkey is already muscle-flexing, ready to attack Peshmerga positions.
And even as Abadi’s Shia government celebrates the Mosul victory, there are fears of an ISIS Mark II if he fails to reassure the city’s Sunni Muslims he will protect them.
The tension is piano-wire tight. The tune being played now is hope. But in this discordant land, a crescendo of conflict is never very far away.