Mosul will fall – but it may take a bigger U.S. presence to force Islamic State out

Bearing in mind that Pentagon sources were claiming as long ago as March that the intense air war waged since August 2014 had already killed 30,000 IS supporters, the surprise is that IS can even envisage defending Mosul for any length of time. It may well be the case that they try, though – and if that is how the war develops, then the most likely pattern will be for slow progress by Iraqi forces in the coming weeks, backed up by intensive use of air power and artillery support by coalition forces.

Fear for civilians
The experience of Kobane in 2015 and Ramadi more recently is that IS will eventually be forced out – but with massive destruction of large parts of the city. In both of those cases, though, most civilians had already left, whereas the huge fear in Mosul is the risk to hundred of thousands of civilians still in the city.

IS may still decide suddenly to withdraw, as happened with Ramadi and Fallujah, but if not the city is likely to be retaken by the coalition some time before the end of the year. From a US perspective, the Obama administration is very keen to see this happen before he stands down in January – and this means that if the operation proves difficult then the Pentagon will simply increase the use of force. It is now clear that the substantial U.S. military presence of at least 5,000 personnel is likely to increase still further, including 1,700 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division.

Washington is clearly preparing to maintain a substantial US military presence likely in Iraq long after Mosul is retaken.

Power shifts
There are two further elements, both getting scarcely any media coverage. One is that, as IS moves away from being fixated on its caliphate, it is now embarking on more of a virtual existence – recruiting across the world with a focus on Western countries. The group sees the three years or so of the caliphate as having a crucial long-term significance – nearly a century since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, IS showed that a small but determined group could withstand the world’s strongest military force. The implication is that it can do it again, aided by the long-term return of “Crusader” (American) forces to Iraq, which will ensure yet more support for IS.

The second is that even if IS is in decline, what is happening in parallel is the rebirth of groups linked formally or informally to al-Qaeda which has reinvented itself as a less extreme entity that pays greater deference to local cultures and is promoting this in marked contrast to the sheer brutality of ISIS. It is a change that is working across much of northern Syria as smaller militias flock to the cause.

One of the most extraordinary developments is that a substantial part of the resistance to the Assad regime and the Russians in eastern Aleppo is coming from extreme Islamist militias. This takes us to a tricky situation which is no doubt causing private concern among some of the more thoughtful Western politicians. The West is fighting an extreme Islamist movement in Mosul and is supporting Kurdish forces taking on IS near Raqqa, while roundly condemning the Russians for fighting extreme Islamist militias in Aleppo.

Certainly, the Russian use of air power is far less discriminate than the coalition’s but Putin’s propagandists just point to the British and American arming of the Saudis in their indiscriminate air assaults in Yemen.

It goes further – the United Kingdom is working in parallel with Iranian interests in Iraq and Syria to defeat IS, while working directly against Iranian interests in Yemen to support the Saudis in their conflict with the Houthis. The contradictions are barely credible and in all cases – Syria, Iraq, and Yemen – it is ordinary people who are suffering.

Paul Rogers is Professor of Peace Studies, University of Bradford. This article is published courtesy of The Conversation (under Creative Commons-Attribution / No derivative).