IS loses ground in Iraq, but remains deadly
BAGHDAD: Less than 10 per cent of Iraqi territory remain in the hands of Islamic State, but battlefield advances have not been matched by better security inside Iraq, the country’s defence minister said on Thursday.
Iraq is mounting a campaign to retake Mosul, the de facto IS capital, after recapturing Falluja last month.
But a suicide bombing here less than a week after Falluja fell killed almost 300 people, and bombings since then had taken at least 51 lives.
“Progress in military performance must be paired with progress on the security file,” Defence Minister Khalid al-Obeidi tweeted from Washington before a meeting of defence ministers from the United States-led coalition battling the ultra-hardline militants.
At its peak, IS had captured between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of Iraqi territory. The ground it holds has been reduced, but the militants could still inflict tremendous damage in Iraq’s towns and cities.
The suicide bombing earlier this month, which killed at least 292 in one of the worst such attacks since the US-led invasion in 2003, was a “stark example” of that failure, Obeidi said. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
He said the battle for Mosul, which gained momentum since the recapture of Falluja and a northern airbase, required airstrikes, intelligence, logistics and engineering support.
Obeidi said he expected the estimated two million residents to flee Mosul as they had done in recent battles, and that the offensive would require coordination with Peshmerga forces from the autonomous Kurdish region.
That population estimate is nearly double recent projections from the United Nations, which predicted that displacement from Mosul would require the largest humanitarian relief operation in the world this year.
Obeidi acknowledged the need for political understandings about the offensive and post-IS management, but it was far from certain that Iraq could accomplish that before the battle begins.
Although Iraqi and US officials had not announced a timetable for moving on the city, a senior Baghdad-based diplomat and a Western official said Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi wanted to push into Mosul by October.
Western officials said retaking the city without a plan to restore security, basic services and governance, along with money and personnel to implement it, risked repeating the mistake former US president George W. Bush’s administration made in 2003, by toppling one government without plans for a new one.
Mosul and its outskirts are a mosaic of different ethnic and religious groups lying between Turkey, Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan. Reuters