Iraqi assault to retake Mosul months away: Iraq, U.S. officials

PanARMENIAN.Net - It will take many more months to prepare Iraq's still struggling military for a long-anticipated assault on the Islamic State group's biggest stronghold in the country, the city of Mosul, U.S. and Iraqi officials say — and it may not even be possible to retake it this year, despite repeated vows by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, the Associated Press reports.

As the U.S. and its allies furiously work to train thousands more troops for the daunting task of retaking Iraq's second largest city, Islamic State fighters are waging a diversion campaign of bloody suicide attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere.

Their aim is to force Iraq's already overburdened security forces to spread even thinner to protect the capital and other cities rather than prepare the Mosul operation.

Iraq's answer to that has been a plan to build a wall around the capital. Meanwhile, the U.S.-led coalition and the Iraqis are struggling to protect pockets of territory that have been recaptured from the extremists.

"Mosul will be very complicated, it will be a mix of forces and it will be very important to ensure it's well planned," Brett McGurk, President Barack Obama's envoy to the U.S.-led coalition fighting IS, said Saturday, March 5.

U.S. Army Col. Christopher Garver, a coalition spokesman, put it more bluntly. "The forces that are going to conduct that assault into the city, they're not in place yet."

The northern city of Mosul, once home to more than a million people, was the biggest prize captured by IS when it swept over much of Iraq's north and west in the summer of 2014 and declared a "caliphate" across those lands and territory it holds in Syria. While Iraqi forces have clawed back some territory in the past year, retaking Mosul is considered crucial for breaking the jihadis' back in the country. Estimates of the number of IS fighters in Mosul vary from a few thousand to "not more than 10,000," according to the coalition.

The Iraqi military is still struggling to regroup. When Mosul fell to IS, more than a third of the military disintegrated as thousands of soldiers shed their uniforms and dropped their weapons to flee. In the following months, tens of thousands more Iraqi troops were identified as "ghost soldiers" — nonexistent troops whose pay was pocketed by commanders.