Mosul, Baghdad and ISIS

The Iraqis and the rest of the world now recall that ISIS gained control of Mosul a year ago on 10 June; it is the second largest city in Iraq after Baghdad. This event forced people to wake up and deal with a new reality and dynamic of a military power imposed on the ground and on Iraqi politics in a way that brought an inevitable end to Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki’s government. The ability of ISIS to gain control of Mosul also shook the pillars of a political project in which many parties were interested and had invested, especially the United States. From the very beginning, though, ISIS fighters have said that their goal is not Mosul but Baghdad.

Despite the international coalition led by Washington and the popular front led by Tehran, the ISIS leadership has more or less succeeded in achieving all of its goals, for there is no force truly capable of preventing the group from moving southward towards the Iraqi capital. The cities in provinces like Salah Al-Din and those within Anbar province are falling apart as they come under the power of ISIS, which has now extended to nearly one-third of Iraq, especially in areas that have suffered greatly due to the American occupation of 2003 and even more so during Al-Maliki’s rule.

The inevitable result is the slow creep of ISIS forces towards Baghdad, which is significant because the city carries a great deal of political weight for numerous factions. Iran took the decision to move all subsequent wars and battles far from the capital. In Tikrit, many thought that foreign intervention would be the beginning of the end for ISIS in Iraq but the reality that unfolded was not that solid; and while popular militias achieved some small victories in Tikrit and Baiji, ISIS eventually made a comeback and re-captured important facilities in the latter which destroyed the country economically. We then began to see hundreds of bodies belonging to unknown children and watched the raging battles without knowing what their outcome would be. The men fighting for ISIS are only in search of one thing and that is death.

Before we take a moment to look back on the first anniversary of the so-called Islamic State’s capture of Mosul and Salah Al-Din, we must remember that ISIS came back and surprised us when it gained control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province just 100 kilometres from Baghdad. The world reacted to the fall of Ramadi just as it did to the fall of Mosul. The US and Iran tried to intervene, and demands were made for the empowerment of popular forces. Everyone was genuinely concerned about how these events were unfolding. Shortly afterwards, the International Conference on Peace and Security in Iraq was held in Paris, followed by another meeting in Berlin, looking to find a way out of the impasse in Iraq and a way to recover Ramadi. In the minds of the ISIS leaders, however, Ramadi is just a stepping stone on the road to Baghdad.

The analyses of military strategists suggest that ISIS will need to wage many battles on the outskirts of Baghdad and other cities under its control, such as Fallujah, Al-Karma and Husiba. All are between 15 and 30 kilometres away from Baghdad and will, from a military point of view, require outside forces to loosen ISIS’s grip. Those who have studied the group’s strategy know very well that they are close to achieving their goal and that they will gain control of Baghdad from within and not through any other way.

Translated from Al-Araby Al-Jadid, 18 June, 2015

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