City found relatively unscathed

>> TAL AFAR: An airstrike left a crater the size of a tennis court in one neighborhood. Artillery punched a gaping hole in the minaret of the city’s main mosque. Some buildings were levelled.

But in the hard calculus of the war against the Islamic State (IS), which was evicted from Tal Afar this week after three years of occupation, that was good news.

The majority of Tal Afar’s structures are still standing, even if many have been defaced. Compared with the wholesale destruction in the battle to retake Mosul, where the worst-hit neighbourhoods resemble the landscape after a huge quake, the smaller city to the north is largely intact — even if it may still take months to repair the scarred masonry, cover up craters and sweep aside the detritus left by IS fighters.

The speed of the victory — 11 days compared with nine months for Mosul — is partly responsible for the comparatively limited damage.

Military commanders said that, unlike in Mosul, they had encircled the city but left an opening in the security cordon, intentionally creating an escape corridor for the trapped fighters, who they hoped would flee into the open desert where they could be picked off.

“I thought I would find my house demolished,” said Mohammed Wahab, a soldier from Tal Afar who returned to his hometown on Friday, three years after having fled.

There are a number of reasons the city was spared, while others were not. Tal Afar had less strategic significance to the IS, which invested fewer resources to defend it. Relatively few civilians were trapped inside, making it easier for troops to manoeuvre.

But commanders are also citing the decision they made to leave an exit for the militants, a tactic also used in previous battles including in the cities of Fallujah and Ramadi.

It is a tactic military officers rarely discuss, partly because it invites criticism that they were soft on the IS by letting its fighters escape.

Using the ashtray in his office to represent the city of Tal Afar, Gen Najim al-Jobori traced his fingers around the edge of the circular shape counterclockwise, stopping just before he completed the circle. The gap represented the spot purposely left open in Tal Afar’s northern neighbourhood.

“The security cordon in the north of the city was never fully closed so that the fighters could flee, with the plan of killing them later in the desert,” said the general, commander of operations in Nineveh province, which includes Mosul and Tal Afar. “This was so that the city could be saved.”

The opening in the security cordon was confirmed by Gen Haider Alubaidi, a deputy commander in Iraq’s elite Counterterrorism Service. “How we avoided destroying the city is that we opened a loophole for the terrorists to escape,” he said.

But if the plan was to kill them in the desert, that did not fully pan out. Hundreds of IS fighters surrendered to Kurdish peshmerga forces about 25km north of the city. The mass surrender invited criticism, including from Iraq’s former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, whose relations with Iraq’s Kurds were always troubled.

“The most important question, who allowed for hundreds of terrorists to withdraw from Tal Afar and deliver their weapons to the peshmerga forces?” Mr Maliki asked. “Everyone knows that Tal Afar was not liberated by fighting, but by an agreement.”

Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Studies, said the escape corridor concept had been used in the battles for Ramadi and Fallujah, Iraq’s first two major confrontations against the IS. “It’s a very Iraqi tactic — this is not something that the US military would think up on its own,” said Mr Knights, who has been studying Iraq for more than a decade.

Giving militants an exit has been part of the Iraq military’s approach since 2015. “The Iraqis have consistently said, ‘Let’s give them a way out, because we don’t want Ramadi or Fallujah to get wrecked’,” Mr Knights said.

Until Mosul, the evacuation corridor concept yielded mixed results. In Ramadi, Mr Knights said, the militants simply used the opening to add reinforcements, lengthening the conflict. The city was finally retaken in early 2016, but left in ruins.

By contrast, in the fight for Fallujah, convoys of IS fighters used the opening to escape and their convoy was later bombed, said Mr Knights, describing that example as a success.

When the operation began in October to retake Mosul — by far the largest city controlled by the IS — Iraq’s military and its coalition partners began with a push in eastern Mosul.

Three months later, the eastern half was declared liberated with limited damage, as the IS fighters fled across the Tigris River to the city’s western and more congested half.

That is when the battle got particularly ugly, as the militants became trapped in warrens of the Old City. Airstrike after airstrike pounded the area, obliterating buildings into powder.

A senior US general described the combat as the worst he had seen in 35 years.