An Excellent Summary of the Syrian Civil War

No end in sight for Syria war as conflict enters fifth year

Four years since the start of the conflict, Assad is emboldened as international attention is drawn to the threat of Islamic State

Middle East Eye, Sunday 15 March 2015 11:12 GMT

http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/syria-enters-fifth-year-bloody-civil-conflict-73269927

Syria’s conflict enters its fifth year on Sunday, with no end in sight to the fighting. 

More than 210,000 people have been killed and half of the country’s population displaced, prompting rights groups to accuse the international community of “failing Syria”.

The country now lies carved up by government forces, militant groups - including Islamic State - Kurdish fighters and the so-called moderate opposition. 

Diplomacy remains stalled, with two rounds of peace talks achieving no progress and even a proposal for a local ceasefire in Aleppo fizzling out.

The conflict began as an anti-government uprising, with small-scale protests, inspired by similar revolts in Egypt and Tunisia, taking place in Damascus in February.  

But things quickly spiralled when the government arrested and tortured a group of teenagers in the southern city of Deraa. In response, hundreds took to the streets in Damascus and Aleppo on 15 March. Several days later, on 18 March another protest broke out after Friday prayers in Deraa. Government forces once fired on the demonstrators, killing several people. The violence only prompted thousands to turn out the following day to attend the funerals of those killed. The government once again fired on the marchers, killing between one to six people according to activists. The government then released the teenagers on 21 March, but the deaths and the fierce crackdown prompted a militarisation of the uprising and its descent into today’s brutal multi-front conflict.

The consequences have been devastating.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR says Syria is now “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era”.

Around four million people have fled abroad, with more than a million taking refuge in neighbouring Lebanon.

Inside Syria, more than seven million people have been displaced, and the UN says around 60 percent of the population now lives in poverty.

The country’s infrastructure has been decimated, its currency is in freefall and economists say the economy has been set back some 30 years.

Assad government emboldened

Rights groups have documented horrific violations, with the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reporting this week that 13,000 people had been tortured to death in government detention since the uprising began.

Tens of thousands more remain in government jails and detention facilities, with many effectively disappearing after their arrest.

Despite international outrage at the death toll, and allegations that his government used chemical weapons against its own people in August 2013, President Bashar al-Assad has clung to power.

His forces have consolidated their grip on the capital Damascus and are moving to encircle rebels in the second city of Aleppo to the north.

The assaults have been aided by the government’s increasing reliance on crude explosives-packed barrel bombs, which Assad denies using despite extensive documentation.

His government is newly emboldened by both its military successes and an apparent shift in international rhetoric.

Calls for his resignation have been notably more muted as international attention shifts to the threat posed by the Islamic State group.

Diplomats describe a new willingness to countenance a role for Assad in Syria’s future, and even the rhetoric from key Assad opponent Washington has shifted.

On Friday, CIA director John Brennan said Washington was concerned that the “collapse” of Syria’s government could open the way for a IS takeover.

US Secretary of State John Kerry has also stressed that Washington’s top priority is defeating IS. 

Little prospect for peace

Last year, the United States assembled a coalition of nations to fight the group in Syria and Iraq, where IS rule a swathe of territory they have deemed an Islamic “caliphate”.

Air strikes, particularly in concert with the efforts of Kurdish fighters on the ground in Syria, have rolled back some IS gains, but the group continues to wield significant power.

It has grabbed international headlines with gruesome propaganda videos depicting the killings of journalists, aid workers and other civilians.

It has also attracted thousands of foreign fighters, many from the West, prompting concern about the prospect of attacks by returning militants.

Despite the international attention, there is little prospect of a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

Two rounds of UN-sponsored talks in Switzerland failed to achieve progress, and Staffan de Mistura, the third UN envoy to tackle the conflict, has gained little traction with his proposal for a localised ceasefire in Aleppo.

Russia, a key Assad ally, is floating its own dialogue process, and will host talks in Moscow in April, but it remains unclear if the internationally recognised opposition will attend.

On Thursday, a group of 21 rights groups denounced the international community for failing to implement UN resolutions and end the conflict.

“This is a betrayal of our ideals,” said Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council group.

How Tough is the Peshmerga?

The Peshmerga, manned by Sunni Kurds, is generally considered to be the West’s toughest and most reliable bulwark against Isis in Iraq.  But for reasons explained by Patrick Cockburn below, that belief may reflect more of a hope than a strategic reality.

War with Isis: The Kurdish Tiger's roar is worse than its bite - the Peshmerga have come to rely on US air strikes

World View: With militant fighters at the gate, the former boom town of Irbil is full of refugees and abandoned buildings

BY PATRICK COCKBURN, Independent, 8 March 2015

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/war-with-isis-the-kurdish-tigers-roar-is-worse-than-its-bite--the-peshmerga-have-come-to-rely-on-us-air-strikes-10093497.html

[Reposted with permission of the author]

“They are like the Mongols,” says Najmaldin Karim, speaking of the forces of Islamic State (Isis) battering at the defences of the oil province of Kirkuk, of which he is governor. They have not broken through and he is confident they will not do so, but the threat they pose and the fear they cause is the dominant feature of life even in those parts of northern Iraq they did not conquer last year.

In terms of the terror that Isis inspires through the savagery of its actions, it does indeed have much in common with the Mongolian horsemen who destroyed Baghdad and slaughtered its inhabitants in 1258. Isis similarly cultivates an atmosphere of fear among its enemies, so that the Iraqi army disintegrated when Isis forces stormed Mosul last June and much the same thing happened when they attacked the supposedly more resolute Iraqi Peshmerga in Sinjar and Nineveh Plain a few months later.

The swift victories of Isis at that time gave the impression of a demonic and unstoppable force. In the eyes of Isis leaders, military successes far beyond what they had expected simply affirmed that they were carrying out God’s work and had divine support. Less attention was given to the weaknesses of the states and armies which Isis had so easily defeated. But it is on their ability to learn from past failings that the outcome of the war now being fought in Iraq and Syria will be determined.

Criticism of Isis’s opponents and their dismal performance on the battlefield has mainly focussed on the Baghdad government. There is no doubt that its corruption and sectarianism played into the hands of Isis. Less attention is given as to why the military forces of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), supposedly far tougher and better commanded, fled from the Isis attack in August even faster than the Iraqi army in June. Yazidi villagers from Sinjar and Christians from the Nineveh Plain complain bitterly that they were abandoned by Peshmerga units whom only hours earlier had sworn to defend them to the last drop of their blood. It was one of the most shameful defeats in history.

The KRG has always got a better press than the Baghdad government, particularly since its oil boom got under way in the past five or six years. It presented itself as “the other Iraq”, which functioned properly, and Kurdish leaders invariably disparaged the central government in Baghdad as crooked and dysfunctional. They pointed to new five-star hotels, shopping malls, roads, bridges and apartment buildings sprouting on every street in Irbil, the Kurdish capital. There was a boom town atmosphere, and there were very few places on earth of which this could be said in the wake of the financial crash of 2008. Delegations of foreign businessmen, many of whom could not have found Iraqi Kurdistan on the map a couple of years earlier, poured into Irbil. Local managers complained that they could not find rooms for them despite all the new hotels. It seemed to go to the heads of Kurdish leaders who spoke of KRG becoming like an oil state in the Gulf, a landlocked version of Dubai.

Visiting KRG a couple of years ago, I felt that it was alarmingly similar in mood to Ireland pre-2008 at the height of the Celtic Tiger boom. The Kurds and the Irish are both small nations who feel they have been hard done-by throughout their history. Now they had thrown off foreign oppression and were getting rich like their neighbours. In Irbil as in Dublin it was a feeling conducive to delusion and a belief that “the Kurdish tiger” would bound forward for ever.

What those plane-loads of over-optimistic foreign government ministers and businessmen never understood was how fragile all this was. There was more in common between the ways in which the KRG and the rest of Iraq were ruled than they imagined. The Kurds depended on their 17 per cent share of Iraq’s oil revenues to pay the one in three of the labour force that worked for the government. Corruption was rife. A friend told me that he lived in part of Irbil surrounded by director generals working for the government: “I have a higher salary than any of them, but they have houses three times bigger than mine.” One Kurdish woman told me: “I call it ‘Corruptistan’.” For all the new five-star hotels, it was difficult to find a good school or hospital.

KRG was always flattered by any comparison with Baghdad. “Ease of doing business in Irbil compared to Baghdad is very good,” a businessman told me in early 2013. “Compared to the rest of the world it is rubbish.”

What really made Iraqi Kurdistan different from the rest of Iraq was that security was good, and it felt safe. Kurds and foreigners alike never seemed to look at a map and notice that they lived an hour’s drive from some of the most violent places on the planet. Mosul is only 50 miles from Irbil and has never been other than an extraordinarily dangerous city since 2003.

The belief that Iraqi Kurdistan is the safe part of Iraq was punctured when Isis captured Mosul last June. Even then, the Kurdish leadership deluded itself that what had happened was a Sunni-Shia battle in which they could stay on the sidelines and even benefit by opportunistically taking over Arab-Kurdish disputed areas. In August, they discovered they had made a calamitous error when Isis launched an ambitious offensive that came close to capturing Irbil. The United States and Iran rushed to help, while the KRG’s new ally, Turkey, found itself unable to.

Irbil today looks like Pompeii or Herculaneum in which a sudden disaster – in the Kurds’ case military rather than volcanic – has frozen all activity. The city is full of half-completed hotels, shopping malls and apartment buildings. Some of these are crammed full of refugees living in huts provided by the UN High Commission for Refugees. These are the people who are paying the price for the Kurdish leadership’s delusions of grandeur and security. Overall, there are 1.2 million extra internally displaced people and Kurdish refugees from Syria in KRG since last June. Kurdish leaders claim credit for giving them refuge, but many of those who have lost their homes blame those same leaders for underestimating the Isis threat when it was containable.

The Peshmerga have made successful counter-attacks, taking back much of Sinjar, but Mosul and its surroundings remain firmly under Isis rule and, so long as this continues, the KRG will remain fundamentally insecure. Crucial to the Peshmerga advances have been US air strikes, and it is noticeable in visits to the frontline how dependent the Peshmerga is on US air power.

This staves off the prospect of total defeat, but the future of the Iraqi Kurds still looks grim even if it is not as bad as it looked last August when many in Irbil started to flee the city just as they had done in 1991 during Saddam Hussein’s counter-offensive. Whatever happens, as in Ireland after 2008, the days of the “Kurdish tiger” are truly over.

Stalingrad on the Tigress II

Did the MILCRATs Head Off a Disaster?

My earlier posting on this subject argued that CENTCOM’s planned attack on the Mosul was ‘a bridge too far’ because (1) the long distance to be traversed through hostile Sunni territory by 25,000 untested Shi’a troops would leave the Iraqi army increasingly vulnerable to a welter of flank attacks in an offensive that would necessarily stretch into the debilitating heat of the summer; (2) the movement would expose Baghdad and elsewhere to spoiling attacks by ISIS; and (3) the Kobani model of fixing ISIS troops with a ground attack on a symbolic city and then using airpower to bomb ISIS to smithereens simply did not apply to the far larger urban sprawl of Mosul. 

Nancy Youssef now reports that saner heads have prevailed and this mad plan is now on indefinite hold.

There may be more to this bizarre episode that meets the eye, however.  

Everyone knows the American military is obsessed with secrecy.  That suggests an obvious question: Why would planners in CENTCOM’s headquarters  violate the principle of “loose lips sink ships”?

Youssef’s original report suggested that CENTCOM sources told her they were trying to ”psych out”  ISIS.  Youssef  is one of the better reporters covering the Middle East, so there is no reason to question her characterization of this “leak.”  But the rationale rings hollow.  ISIS’s shocking mix of blitzkrieg and psy-ops over last summer makes it difficult to believe that CENTCOM planners could be so naive as to believe that a bombastic threat would out psych ISIS.  

What gives?

Only time will answer this question.  But there is one obvious hypothesis that bears thinking about: Namely, the bureaucratic hypothesis that loose lips are sometimes intended to sink the ship.  

Such a hypothesis might go something like this:  Perhaps the military was being pressured to retake Mosul by civilian political operatives in the US national security apparat — operatives who were eager to deflect partisan criticism for the heretofore lackluster conduct in Obama’s war to “degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS.  Retaking Mosul would undo one of the crown jewels of ISIS’s blitzkrieg.  That would hand the Obama administration a spectacular victory.  

But rather than taking the high road of threatening to resign in protest over such an amateurish plan, the seasoned MILCRATs in the office of the Joint Chiefs and/or CENTOM did what they are really good at doing: that is to say, they decided to increase their political leverage by leaking the plan to the press, knowing that the leak would cause the plan to self destruct.  The military would be off the hook, the civilian pol-mil hacks put in their place, and the Pentagon’s allies on Capitol Hill given an issue to exploit in the looming policy war over the defense budget.

No doubt, there are other legitimate hypotheses to explain this weird episode, but the preceding speculation is certainly consistent with the kind of antics and bureaucratic gamesmanship I saw repeatedly in the Pentagon during my 25 years in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  

There is one litmus test for this hypothesis: Will CENTCOM go on witch hunt to find the ‘leaker’?  After all, in a military culture where A-10 pilots can be accused of treason for leaking the merits of their own plane, a leak of this magnitude — if not ‘authorized’ — would certainly qualify as treason.

Stalingrad on the Tigris: The Kobani Model Writ Large?

Last summer, in a scene reminiscent of Lawrence of Arabia, the 350,000 man Iraqi army, trained and armed at an expense of $25 billion over a 10 year period by the US, collapsed in a few short weeks after being blitzed by a few thousand, lightly armed, fast moving ISIS irregulars. The crown jewel in the spectacular ISIS offensive was its capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, on the banks of the River Tigris, 225 miles north of Baghdad.  Subsequent ISIS operations quickly captured most of the inhabited areas north and west of Baghdad (see map). 

On 19 February, CENTCOM announced plans to retake the city using a rebuilt Iraqi army in alliance with the Kurdish Peshmerga army.  If true, the CENTCOM plan to retake Mosul beggars belief for several reasons:

1. To pull this off, CENTCOM must somehow assemble up to 25,000 Iraqi and Peshmerga troops opposite Mosul, then drive out the 2,000 ISIS fighters believed to control the city in a large urban battle.  While the Kurdish Peshmerga forces are near Mosul, they cannot take Mosul alone, because a Kurdish attack would drive the Sunni Arabs remaining in Mosul into the arms of ISIS.  For the same reason, Iraqi forces must include Sunnis as well as Shia’s.  But, the Iraqi forces must march over 225 miles up the Tigris Valley, through ISIS controlled territory, to even reach Mosul.  Such a movement would weaken the forces defending Baghdad and open up the real possibility of ISIS spoiling operations in the south, including attacks on the army’s long exposed lines of communication or even Baghdad itself.  Moreover, how such a power projection and attack by the newly rebuilt and as yet untested Iraqi army could even be launched before the summer heat impedes the massive movement and heavy fighting is a question that boggles the mind.

2. The biggest CENTCOM advantage is airpower.  But airpower is difficult to apply effectively against small units engaged in a big-city urban battle.  Moreover, as any soldier who has experienced urban combat will tell you, the chaotic rubble of urban destruction will increase the defensive power of the ISIS positions.  And … no one knows how many Sunni Arabs remain in Mosul.  Its population numbered 1.8 million in 2008, but about 500,000 fled after ISIS conquered it in 2014.  The population was mostly Sunni Arab, but with Assyrian, Turkmen, and Kurdish minorities. Today Mosul is overwhelmingly Sunni, and as many as a million Sunnis may remain in the city. To be sure, many of these Sunnis hate ISIS, but an attack on Mosul could drive them to support (or not oppose) ISIS.

3. Another large uncertainty is the strength of ISIS. The CIA estimates ISIS forces to number between 20,000 and 31,500, with as many as 20,000 foreigners, while as Patrick Cockburn notes in the attached report, others believe its forces number over 100,000.  Whatever the case, it is clear that ISIS has the sufficient numbers to reinforce Mosul, or more importantly, and more likely in my opinion, ISIS has the forces needed to launch spoiling attacks against weakened Iraqi defense elsewhere, including LOCs and Baghdad.

4. Finally, as Cockburn points out, ISIS is still swimming in resources, with the Gulf oil states still bankrolling it.  

Given these complications, which are explained in greater detail below, a natural question arises:  Why is CENTCOM telegraphing its punch?  Why sacrifice surprise in what would be a rapid and audacious deep stroke that depends on surprise?

Some reporters have interpreted the CENTCOM announcement as an effort to out-psych ISIS.  But how? 

Perhaps, and I am only guessing, CENTCOM planners believe they can taunt ISIS and hype its arrogance to a point where ISIS forgets why it lost the siege at Kobani.  In this vein, perhaps CENTCOM planners assume ISIS leaders are so stupid, that waving the red flag in front of the bull will enable Iraqi-Peshmerga  ground forces to fix ISIS, while US and allied forces methodically bomb ISIS to smithereens in a gigantic repeat of Kobani.  

Let us hope the Kobani model  is NOT part of the psyops operation.  The model does not apply to Mosul.  Kobani was a small city of 45,000 located in the open country.  Mosul, in contrast, is a huge sprawling city with perhaps about a million Sunni Arabs remaining in its environs.  Planners would due well to remember that in August 1942, Stalingrad had a pre-siege population of 400,000, or about half that of ISIS-occupied Mosul.  

The Kobani model applied to a siege of Iraq’s second largest city would imply a siege on a sprawling urban scale far larger than the relatively compact city of Stalingrad.  To be sure, destruction would not be as great due to our obvious resource limitations, but the urban battlefield would be far larger than Stalingrad and far more complex than Kobani.  

Perhaps more sensible heads will prevail in this psyops operation, because it looks like we are in for a long war. 

Private donors from Gulf oil states helping to bankroll salaries of up to 100,000 Isis fighters

Exclusive: In Irbil, Patrick Cockburn hears from a Kurdish official how Gulf oil cash is shoring up the terrorists, and why this, with a divided enemy, suggests a long war ahead

PATRICK COCKBURN, Independent. Sunday 22 February 2015

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-has-made-many-enemies-but-it-may-be-saved-by-their-inability-to-unite-10061739.html

[Posted with permission of the author]

Islamic State is still receiving significant financial support from Arab sympathisers outside Iraq and Syria, enabling it to expand its war effort, says a senior Kurdish official.

The US has being trying to stop such private donors in the Gulf oil states sending to Islamic State (Isis) funds that help pay the salaries of fighters who may number well over 100,000.

Fuad Hussein, the chief of staff of the Kurdish President, Massoud Barzani, told The Independent on Sunday: “There is sympathy for Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for IS, also known as Isis] in many Arab countries and this has translated into money – and that is a disaster.”  He pointed out that until recently financial aid was being given more or less openly by Gulf states to the opposition in Syria – but by now most of these rebel groups have been absorbed into IS and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate, so it is they “who now have the money and the weapons”.

Mr Hussein would not identify the states from which the funding for IS comes today, but implied that they were the same Gulf oil states that financed Sunni Arab rebels in Iraq and Syria in the past.

Dr Mahmoud Othman, a veteran member of the Iraqi Kurdish leadership who recently retired from the Iraqi parliament, said there was a misunderstanding as to why Gulf countries paid off IS. It is not only that donors are supporters of IS, but that the movement “gets money from the Arab countries because they are afraid of it”, he says. “Gulf countries give money to Da’esh so that it promises not to carry out operations on their territory.”

Iraqi leaders in Baghdad privately express similar suspicions that IS –  with a territory the size of Great Britain and a population of six million fighting a war on multiple fronts, from Aleppo to the Iranian border – could not be financially self-sufficient, given the calls on its limited resources.

Islamic State is doing everything it can to expand its military capacity, as the Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, and the US Central Command (CentCom) threaten an offensive later this year to recapture Mosul. Regardless of the feasibility of this operation, IS forces are fighting in widely different locations across northern and central Iraq.

[Click on Map to Enlarge]

On Tuesday night they made a surprise attack with between 300 and 400 fighters, many of them North Africans from Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, on Kurdish forces 40 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Irbil. The Kurds say that 34 IS fighters were killed in fighting and by US air strikes. At the same time, IS was battling for control of the town of al-Baghdadi, several hundred miles away in Anbar province. Despite forecasts by a CentCom spokesman last week that the tide has turned and that IS is on the retreat there is little sign of this on the ground.

On the contrary, IS appears to have the human and financial resources to fight a long war, though both are under strain. According to interviews by The Independent with people living in Mosul reached by phone, or with recent refugees from the city, IS officials are conscripting at least one young man from every family in Mosul, which has a population of 1.5 million. It has drafted a list of draconian punishments for those not willing to fight, starting with 80 lashes and ending with execution.

All these new recruits receive pay, as well as their keep, which until recently was $500 (£324) a month but has now been cut to about $350. Officers and commanders receive much more. A local source, who did not want to be named, says that foreign fighters, of whom there are an estimated 20,000 in IS, get a much higher salary – starting at $800 a month.

“I know three foreign fighters,” said Ahmad, a 45-year-old shopkeeper still working in Mosul. “I usually see them at checkpoints in our neighbourhood: one is Turkish and the others are Europeans. Some of them speak a little Arabic. I know them well because they buy soft drinks from the shops in our neighbourhood. The Turkish one is my customer. He says he talks to his family using the satellite internet service that is available for the foreigners, who have excellent privileges in terms of salaries, spoils and even captives.”

Ahmad added: “Isis fighters have arrested four high-school teachers for telling their students not to join Isis.” Islamic State fighters have entered the schools and demanded that students in their final year join them. Isis has also lowered the conscription age below 18 years of age, leading some families to leave the city. Military bases for the training and arming of children have also been established.

Given this degree of mobilisation by Islamic State, statements from Mr Abadi and CentCom about recapturing Mosul this spring, using between 20,000 and 25,000 Baghdad government and Kurdish forces, sound like an effort to boost morale on the anti-Isis side.

The CentCom spokesman claimed there were only between 1,000 and 2,000 Isis fighters in Mosul, which is out of keeping with what local observers report. Ominously, Iraqi and foreign governments have an impressive record of underestimating Isis as a military and political force over the past two years.

Mr Hussein said at the end of last year that Isis had “hundreds of thousands of fighters”, at a time when the CIA was claiming they numbered between 20,000 and 31,500. He does not wholly rule out an offensive to take Mosul but, as he outlines the conditions for a successful attack, it becomes clear that he does not expect the city to be recaptured any time soon. For the Kurdish Peshmerga forces to storm Mosul they would need far better equipment “in order to wage a decisive war against Isis and defeat them”, he says. “So far we are only defeating them in various places in Kurdistan by giving our blood. We have had 1,011 Peshmerga killed and about 5,000 wounded.”

The Kurds want heavy weapons including Humvees, tanks to surround but not to enter Mosul, snipers’ rifles, because Isis has many highly accurate snipers, as well as equipment to deal with improvised explosive devices and booby traps, both of which Isis uses profusely.

Above all, Kurdish participation in an offensive would require a military partner in the shape of an effective Iraqi army and local Sunni allies. Without the latter, a battle for Mosul conducted by Shia and Kurds alone would provoke Sunni Arab resistance. Mr Hussein is dubious about the effectiveness of the Iraqi army, which disintegrated last June when, though nominally it had 350,000 soldiers, it was defeated by a few thousand Isis fighters.

“The Iraqi army has two divisions to protect Baghdad, but is it possible for the Iraqi government to release them?” asks Mr Hussein.  “And how will they get to Mosul? If they have to come through Tikrit and Baiji, they will have to fight hard along the way even before they get to Mosul.”

Of course, an anti-Isis offensive has advantages not available last year, such as US air strikes, but these might be difficult to use in a city. The US air force carried out at least 600 air strikes on the Isis-held part of the small Syrian Kurdish city of Kobani before Isis finally retreated after a siege of 134 days. In the most optimistic scenarios Isis splits or there is a popular uprising against it, but so far there is no sign of this and Isis has proved that it exacts merciless vengeance against any individual or community opposed to it.

Mr Hussein makes another important point: difficult and dangerous though it may be for the Kurds and the Baghdad government to recapture Mosul, they cannot afford to leave it alone. It was here that Isis won its first great victory and Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi declared the caliphate on 29 June last year.

“Mosul is important politically and militarily,” he says. “Without defeating Isis in Mosul, it will be very difficult to talk about the defeat of Isis in the rest of Iraq.”

At the moment, Peshmerga forces are only eight miles from Mosul. But  Isis fighters are likewise not much further from the Kurdish-held oil city of Kirkuk, which Isis assaulted last month. Given the size of Iraq and the small size of the armies deployed, each side can inflict tactical surprises on the other by punching through scantily held frontlines.

There are two further developments to the advantage of Islamic State. Even in the face of the common threat, the leaders in Baghdad and Erbil remain deeply divided. When Mosul fell last year, the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki claimed that the Iraqi army had been stabbed in the back by a conspiracy between Kurds and Isis. The two sides remain deeply suspicious of each other and, at the start of last week, a delegation led by the Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani failed to reach an agreement in Baghdad on how much of Iraq’s oil revenues should go to the Kurds in exchange for a previously agreed quantity of oil from Kurdish-held northern oilfields.

“Unbelievably, the divisions now are as great as under Maliki,” says Dr Othman. Islamic State has made many enemies, but it may be saved by their inability to unite.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution (Verso)

Can the Iraqi Army Retake Mosul

Attached is an excellent report that discusses the prospects for the Iraqi Army to retake Mosul.

The author, Patrick Cockburn, is on the very best reporters now covering the wars in the Middle East.  His bleak sitrep describes the gloomy prospects for driving ISIS out of Mosul.  Two of his points worth emphasizing: 

1. The Iraqi Army includes 50,000 ghost soldiers who never existed but whose salaries went to officials and officers.  Today, only about 12 brigades with a theoretical strength of 48,000 might be combat ready. This is barely enough to defend Baghdad and the surrounding areas. [Bear in mind, the US already spent over $25 billion on the Iraqi army before it immediately collapsed under ISIS pressure last summer.] Moreover, the most effective Iraqi fighters are the highly sectarian Shi’a militias, whose murderous actions serve to alienate Sunnis and increase their sympathy and recruitment to ISIS.

2. No one knows how many fighters are in ISIS, but Cockburn thinks the ISIS ranks may have swollen to 100,000 Jihadis. This estimate is far larger than official estimates. If true, and Cockburn is a seasoned observer with an impressive track record, the huge number of ISIS fighters is evidence that President Obama’s bombing program to “degrade” ISIS is not accomplishing that objective.  In fact, quite the opposite appears to be taking place. The swollen ranks would not augur well for the retaking of Mosul.  To make matters worse, support for Iraqi government is divided inside Mosul, with many Sunni Arab inhabitants supporting ISIS, some out of fear, others out of sympathy.  Thus emerging conditions are setting the stage for a very violent urban battle, should the Iraqis try to storm Mosul, a fight in which supporting airstrikes will be ineffective and counterproductive. 

The asymmetries in the balance of power explain why Cockburn does not think Iraq can mount a counteroffensive to retake Mosul this year, notwithstanding the Iraqi government’s statements to the contrary.

ISIS Digs In

Fight to the Death for Mosul

by PATRICK COCKBURN, Counterpunch, 18 February 2015

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/18/fight-to-the-death-for-mosul/

[Re-posted with permission of the author and the editor of Counterpunch]

“I fled Mosul when Isis threatened to conscript my brother as one of its fighters, though he is under 18 years of age,” says Ali Hussein Mustafa, a student who left the city a week ago. The self-styled “Islamic State” is seeking to bolster its military forces as it wages war on many fronts and it has introduced a new rule under which men under the age of 18 are no longer exempt from conscription.

The Iraqi government is threatening that it will soon send its army north to recapture Mosul, a city of two million, the loss of which last June was the first in a string of victories by Isis. The Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced this week in an interview that “we are now planning an offensive against Mosul in a few months”.

If the army does attack it will face formidable resistance from the armed forces of Isis that may now number well over 100,000 in Iraq and Syria. Moreover, people in Mosul, the northern capital of Iraq, are divided in their loyalties, judging by interviews with The Independent conducted this month, either after they left the city or by mobile phone, although Isis has banned their use. In a predominantly Sunni Arab city, many are more frightened of largely Shia Iraqi government forces than they are of those on the side of Isis, though they may not like either.

“Some fighters treat the residents cruelly and harshly, while others are well-educated and treat the people well,” says Ali. He cites a local mathematics teacher who joined Isis recently “but was very kind to people and gave money and food to the poor. He often asked me whether I have any information about widows and the disabled in the city. He was donating part of his salary to them.”

Though Ali and his family have become refugees he still argues that many Isis fighters are better than their equivalents in the Iraqi army, which held the city for 10 years before 2014.

At the same time, Ali recalls examples of extreme barbarity, with the hands of men accused of theft being publicly amputated and people discovered using mobile phones receiving 30 lashes. Isis is fearful of spies using mobile phones relaying information to US drones that hover continuously overhead. There are daily air strikes by US aircraft, though most of these are taking place outside the city.  Several senior Isis officials are reported to have died when their vehicles were targeted.

Foreign fighters are particularly brutal towards women not wearing the niqab, a piece of cloth covering the head and face. Ahmad, a shopkeeper who still lives in Mosul, says he was shocked when a woman he knew was taken to a local police station because her eyes were showing even though she was wearing a niqab. He says her punishment was that “a bit used by donkey was put in her mouth and she was told to bite down hard on it – which she did and then had to be taken to hospital afterwards because she was bleeding heavily.”

Mosul is increasingly isolated from the outside world because of the prohibition on the use of mobile phones. Isis has blown up many towers that previously carried a signal, though mobile phone use is still sometimes possible from high places such as rooftops or hill tops.

One place previously used was a stage in Concerts Square in al-Majmu’ah al-Thaqfiyah area but three people were whipped for making calls from there. Whipping is also the punishment for those found at checkpoints to have SIM cards in their pockets.

There is an increasing number of checkpoints inside the city and those at the main exit points often stop anybody leaving who does not have a valid excuse. Trenches have been dug to stop Kurdish Peshmerga forces to the north and east of the city – with, in one case, Isis even putting out a public tender for a trench system.

The Kurds have made advances in recapturing much of the Sinjar area west of Mosul, advancing behind heavy US air attacks against any point where Isis is resisting. But this tactic would be less feasible  in built-up areas such as Tal Afar or Mosul itself.

Kurdish leaders say they would not advance into Sunni Arab areas where all the Sunni would rally against them. One Kurdish commentator, Kamran Karadaghi, says that Kurdish public opinion would not welcome a battle for Mosul in which there would be heavy losses. He says people would ask: “Why should so many Kurds die for a Sunni Arab city?”

Despite Mr Abadi’s declaration that the Iraqi army will recapture Mosul this year, such an assault appears to be well beyond the strength of the Baghdad government, if it relies on its own regular army. This is now said to number 12 brigades with a nominal strength of 48,000 that might be made battle-worthy when aided by US advisers.

But this is barely enough to defend Baghdad and fight in some neighbouring provinces, while the disintegration of the Iraqi army last year as it abandoned northern and western Iraq is not a hopeful portent.

In the past, Iraqi officers have always bought their jobs in order to make money through embezzling funds intended for supplies of food and equipment or by levying tolls on all goods vehicles passing through their checkpoints. Mr Abadi revealed last year that 50,000 soldiers in the army are “ghosts” who never existed but whose salaries went to officials and officers.

The most effective armed force of the Iraqi government is made up of Shia militias which have retaken Diyala province north-east of Baghdad and Sunni towns to the south of the capital. But the Shia militias are highly sectarian, killing or driving out Sunni Arabs who are treated as supporters of Isis whatever their real sympathies.

Isis has targeted Shia civilians in Baghdad and elsewhere using car bombs and suicide bombers causing horrific casualties, thus enabling Isis to pose as defenders of the Sunni Arab community when the Shia retaliate.

Life in Mosul may be grim for its inhabitants with shortages of clean water, fuel and electricity, but food supplies are still adequate. In some respects Isis runs a more active state apparatus than Baghdad which has traditionally done little for the victims of violence.

Ali Hussein Mustafa says that when there was fighting recently between Isis and the Peshmerga, many of the Sunni Arabs from Tal Afar fled the rocket and artillery fire and went to Mosul where Isis organised their accommodation. Isis can afford such bounty because it has confiscated the houses of Christians and others who have been forced to flee.

A successful counter-offensive against Isis leading to the recapture of Mosul does not look likely this year whatever Mr Abadi’s declared intentions. Many of those in the territories of the “Islamic State” would like to end its rule, but only if it were replaced by an  Iraqi army that is disciplined and non-sectarian enough to provide an acceptable alternative.

Patrick Cockburn is the author of ‘The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution’

Can a Gold-Plated Military Counter ISIS?

Lightly armed guerrilla/insurgent/terrorist forces are once again holding off the high-tech, heavily armed forces of the United States.  A string of defeats is slowly accumulating at the strategic and grand-strategic levels of conflict, even though US forces almost always win battles at the tactical level, if they can fix the insurgents and destroy them with overwhelming firepower, particularly bombing.  But when viewed through the overlapping lenses of the operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels of conflict guerrillas have advantages to offset US firepower. 

Faced with the tactical threat of overwhelming conventional firepower, irregular fighters always strive to retain the initiative at the operational level of conflict by perfecting the arts of quick dispersal and blending in with the physical and cultural background, while relying on provocations (beheadings?), hit and run attacks, and the ubiquitous threat of booby traps to keep US forces on edge and increase our expenditure of effort.  To paraphrase T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), the guerrilla’s operational level goal is to wage a war of detachment, presenting a threat everywhere, “never affording a target” and “never on the defensive except by accident or error.” [Boyd, POC, Slide 64]  At the strategic level of conflict, guerrillas aim to wear down US forces by keeping them under continual mental and physical strain, while at the decisive level of grand strategy, their aim is to stretch out and increase the cost of the intervention to undermine the US political will at home, weaken its allied support, keep neutrals neutral or empathetic to guerrilla cause, and attract recruits. 

In short guerrillas love protracted wars -- periods of apparent inaction punctuated by short, sharp fights — or in the naive lexicon of fascinated American counter-insurgency enthusiasts, guerrillas love long wars.  That is because protracted wars create an unfolding stream of events that play into the guerrilla’s hands at the decisive grand-strategic level of conflict. 

Juxtapose the guerrilla art of war to that described by President Obama in his declaration of a war on ISIS last September.  Obama called for yet another high-cost, fire-power centric attrition strategy with the objective “to degrade and ultimately destroy” ISIS  “through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.”  This art of war at its core assumes the art is all tactical — i.e. destruction by bombing — and that this assumption of pure attrition is the only effect of military operations needed to eventually procure success at the operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels of war to “ultimately” destroy ISIS. 

Put another way, the idea of a protracted military operations implicit in Mr. Obama’s words fits the guerrilla strategy like a hand fits a glove.

It is not as if the United States has not experienced the grand-strategic meat grinding effects of this kind of thinking.  They clearly unfolded to our chagrin in Viet Nam.  They are unfolding again in the perpetual Global War on Terror (GWOT), which, in terms money adjusted for inflation, is now by some estimates the second most expensive war in US history, requiring annual defense budgets far exceeding the annual budgets of the much larger, higher tempo Korean and Viet Nam Wars (see graphic).  

One problem is that like guerrillas, the domestic political-economy of the Military - Industrial - Congressional Complex (MICC) has come to love protracted small wars war for the obvious reason that high budgets enrich and strengthen the MICC’s iron triangle, thereby providing it with the political power and wealth needed to keep its game going, just as President Eisenhower feared over 50 years ago in his farewell address (January 1961).  The explosive cost of small wars is a predictable consequence of  the domestic politics of the MICC’s political-economy and its addiction to gold-plated weapons that naturally flow out of dysfunctional bureaucratic/political power games exhibited by the MICC’s well-documented decision-making pathologies. (a subject discussed throughout the variety of reports assembled here.)  

Attached is a report that places the battlefield consequences of our addiction to high-cost gold plated weapons into sharp relief.  The author, Patrick Cockburn, is one of the most astute reporters covering the violent politics now re-shaping the Middle East. Cockburn places these weapons into an effectiveness perspective for the protracted war du jour —  Mr. Obama’s long war to “disrupt, and ultimately destroy” ISIS. Which may be possible ... if ISIS is stupid enough to put all its eggs into the siege of Kobani.

War with Isis: Despite billions spent on weapons, the US has not been able to counter the militants' gruesome tactics

The West needs more than a 'White Knight' if it wants to succeed

PATRICK COCKBURN, Independent, 28 December 2014

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/war-with-isis-the-west-needs-more-than-a-white-knight-9946580.html

[Re-printed with permission of the author]

There is a scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in which Alice meets the White Knight who is wearing full armour and riding a horse off which he keeps falling.

Alice expresses curiosity about why he has placed spiked metal anklets on his horse's legs just above the hoofs. "To guard against the bites of sharks," he explains, and proudly shows her other ingenious devices attached to himself and his horse.

Alice notices that the knight has a mouse trap fastened to his saddle. "I was wondering what the mouse trap was for," says Alice. "It isn't very likely there would be any mice on the horse's back." "Not very likely, perhaps," says the Knight, "but if they do come, I don't choose to have them running all about." It's as well "to be provided for everything", adds the Knight. As he explains his plans for countering these supposed dangers, he continues to tumble off his horse.

The White Knight's approach to military procurement is very similar to that of the American and British military establishments. They drain their budgets to purchase vastly expensive equipment to meet threats that may never exist, much like the sharks and mice that menace Alice's acquaintance. Thus the Pentagon spends $400bn (£257bn) on developing the F-35 fighter (Britain is buying planes at a cost of £100m each) to gain air superiority over Russia and China in the event of a war with either power.

Meanwhile, equipment needed to fight real wars is neglected, even though no answer has been found to old-fashioned weapons such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that caused two-thirds of the US-led coalition's casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A strange aspect of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is that there has been so little criticism of the failure of expensively equipped Western armies to defeat lightly armed and self-trained insurgents. This is in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the US Army's failure to win the war in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s. The question is of more than historic interest because the US, UK and other allies are re-entering the wars in Iraq and Syria where they are seeking to "degrade and ultimately destroy" the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis).

Perhaps the military are not being blamed for lack of success in Iraq and Afghanistan because the failure there is seen as political, rather than military. There is some truth in this, but it is also true that army commanders have been agile in avoiding responsibility for what went wrong. A senior US diplomat asked me in exasperation in Baghdad five or six years ago: "Whatever happened to the healthy belief the American public had after Vietnam that our generals seldom tell the truth?"

Iraq this year has seen a more grotesque and wide-ranging failure than the inability to cope with IEDs. The Iraqi Army was created and trained by the US at great expense, but this summer it was defeated by a far smaller and less well-armed force of insurgents led by Isis. It was one of the most shameful routs in history, as Iraqi Army commanders abandoned their men, jumped into helicopters and fled. The new Iraqi Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, admits that 50,000 "ghost soldiers" in the Iraqi Army had never existed and their salaries fraudulently diverted into their officers' pockets.

The Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police Service, some 350,000 soldiers and 650,000 police, had been built by the US at a cost of $26bn since 2003, according to the recent report of the US Special Investigator General for Iraq Reconstruction. It is a fascinating document that demands answers to many questions, such as how did $9.4bn get spent on training, staffing and supplying the Iraqi police, though this force is notorious for its corruption and incompetence. Another $3.4bn went on supplying the Iraqi Army with tanks, aircraft, boats, armoured personnel carriers and other equipment, much of which was later captured by Isis. Curiously, Isis was immediately able to find crews for the tanks and artillerymen for the guns without any lengthy and expensive training programmes.

The 3,000 American soldiers President Obama has sent back into Iraq are to start training the remaining 26 brigades of the Iraqi Army all over again, without anybody asking what went wrong between 2003 and 2014. Why is it that Isis recruits can fight effectively after two weeks' military training and two weeks' religious instruction, but the Iraqi Army cannot? Maybe the very fact of being foreign-trained delegitimises them in their own eyes and that of their people.

Renewed foreign military intervention in Iraq and Syria is primarily in the form of air strikes of which there have been more than 1,000 since bombing started in Iraq on 8 August. What is striking about these figures is that there have been so few compared to the 48,224 air strikes during the 43 days of bombing against Saddam Hussein's army in 1991. A reason for this is that Isis is a guerrilla force that can be dispersed, so only about 10 per cent of missions flown actually lead to air strikes against targets on the ground.

Only against the Isis forces besieging the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobani in northern Syria is the US Air Force able to inflict heavy casualties. It is not clear why Isis continues with a battle where it is most vulnerable to air power, but the probable reason is that it wants to prove it can win another divinely inspired victory, despite heavy air attacks.

In more than 10 years of war in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, it is the insurgents and not those in charge of Western military policy and procurement who have developed the most effective cocktail of military tactics and methods of attack suited to local circumstances. These include various types of IEDs supplemented by booby traps that make those few areas reconquered from Isis dangerous for soldiers and uninhabitable for civilians.

IS has turned suicide bombing by individuals or by vehicles packed with explosives into an integral part of their fighting repertoire, enabling them to make devastating use of untrained but fanatical foreign volunteers. Isis deploys well-trained snipers and mortar teams, but its most effective weapon is spreading terror by publicising its atrocities through the internet.

Gruesome though these tactics are, they are much more effective than anything developed by Western armies in these same conflicts. Worse, Western training encourages an appetite on the part of its allies for helicopters, tanks and artillery that only have limited success in Iraqi conditions, although bombing does have an impact in preventing Isis using a good road system for attacks by several hundred fighters in convoys of pick-up trucks and captured Humvees.

While Isis may be suffering more casualties, it is in a position to recruit tens of thousands fighters from the population of at least five or six million that it controls. Six months after the Islamic State was declared, it has not grown smaller. As with the White Knight, the US and its allies are not undertaking the measures necessary to fight their real enemy.