Category Iraq

Iraq After Mosul

As Chris mentioned last week, Lieutenant General Stephen J. Townsend, the Commanding General of Combined Joint Task Force – Operation INHERENT RESOLVE, which is working with Iraqi, Kurdish, and Syrian forces to defeat Da’esh, expressed optimism that the campaigns to retake Mosul and Raqaa, the Da’esh stronghold in Syria, would conclude successfully within the next six months. The recapture of Mosul has been a standing objective for the Iraqi government since the city fell to Da’esh militants in 2014. While the liberation of Mosul may be a foregone conclusion at this point, it seems unlikely to mark the end of political turmoil and violence in that country.

A New Sunni Insurgency?

The Institute for the Study of War recently warned that there are signs that that a post-Da’esh insurgency is brewing in Iraq among neo-Bathist Sunni groups and the lingering al-Qaeda (AQ) presence in the country. Da’esh militants also continue to perpetrate attacks in liberated eastern Mosul, as well as outside the city, and will likely transition back to insurgent tactics.

The absence of a political settlement among Iraq’s Shi’a, Sunni, and Kurdish political factions continues to feed the ongoing sectarian conflict driving the insurgent violence. AQ and the Neo-Bathist groups are positioned to exploit Sunni fears of Iranian influence over the Shi’a majority government and the Iranian-supported Shi’a militias (Hash’d al Shaabi).

Trump Administration Policy In Flux

The administration of Donald Trump has had little official to say regarding U.S. policy toward Iraq. However, recent comments by the president that the U.S. should have “kept” Iraq’s oil and the inclusion of the country in his travel ban have roiled Iraqi politics and undercut embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi. Some Iraqi lawmakers have demanded that  al-Abadi reduce cooperation with the U.S., limit U.S. troop deployments there, and impose a reciprocal travel ban on U.S. citizens. Hashd members have threatened to retaliate against U.S. troops in Iraq should Iran be attacked.

In a conversation with al-Abadi last week, Trump promised greater U.S. assistance against terrorism. While Trump has expressed a clear intent to ramp up efforts to destroy Da’esh, accomplishing that goal would have little effect on the underlying political divisions afflicting Iraq. Given Iraq’s military dependence on Iranian assistance, increased tensions between the U.S. and Iran would place al-Abadi’s government in an even more difficult position.

Timeline for Mosul and Raqqa

OK, we now have a new timeline for the taking of Mosul (and Raqqa): us-commander-mosul-raqqa-retaken-6-months

A few highlights:

  1. U.S. commander in Iraq, U.S. Army Lt. General Stephan Townsend, said “within the next six months I think we’ll see both (the Mosul and Raqqa campaigns) conclude.”
  2. Fight for the western half of Mosul to begin in days.
  3. “But on the ground inside Mosul, Iraqi troops said as they neared the Tigris, IS fighters launched few car bombs and largely fled their advances—unlike the heavy resistance they faced in the first few weeks of combat inside the city.”
  4. “ISIL morphing into an insurgent threat, that’s the future,” Townsend said.
  5. Concerning Raqqa: “What we would expect is that within the next few weeks the city will be nearly completely isolated….”

Anyhow……keep waiting for the point when ISIL realizes that an insurgency can’t hold ground forever against a conventional force and decides to go back to being an guerrilla force. This offensive is taking a very long time.

 

East Mosul Taken

By the way, amid all the discussion in the news on crowd sizes, Eastern Mosul fell, sort of. Article here: Iraqi-forces-complete-control-eastern-mosul

Highlights:

  1. “The deputy parliament speaker [of Iraq] announced the capture of the east of the city.”
  2. “Mopping-up operations were still under way on Monday….”
  3. “The west side of Mosul could prove more complicated to take than the east as it is crisscrossed by streets too narrow for armored vehicles.”
  4. “Iraq forces estimated the number of militants inside the city at 5,000 to 6,000 at the start of operations three months ago, and says 3,300 have been killed in the fighting since.”
  5. Took 100 days from the start of the campaign. Two weeks to get there and twelve weeks to clear the east side of the city.

Economics of Warfare 8

Examining the eighth lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture is focused on estimating deaths in a conflict, which is a subject that has produced some unusually high figures through faulty analysis. For example, he starts with a figure of 6.9 million killed in the Congo (slide 2). This leads Dr. Spagat into a discussion of “excess death rate,” which is basically estimating how many additional deaths occur if there is a war going on vice if there is peace (starting slide 4). From slide 4-12 he questions the Congo estimate. He does not offer an alternative figure, but it is clear that the real figure might be considerably lower, in particular as the IRC (International Refugee Committee) used an estimated baseline rate of deaths figure that was probably too low for Congo.

On slide 13 he starts discussing Iraq, where he has done such an estimate (provided on slide 14). His figure is 160,000 excess deaths for Iraq in 2003-2011, which is a lot lower than some of other estimates out there (I think I have seen them as high as 600,000). He then discusses the problems with his estimate (slide 15). From slides 16-30 he discusses further aspects of estimating excess deaths, including looking at regional variation and the impact of war on health (child height) . This may be getting a little bit to much into the weeds for most of our readers.

Anyhow, the main takeaway from all this is to be wary of over-estimates of total losses in wars. Sometimes they can be way too high.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%208.pdf

 

 

CTS Reaches Tigris In Mosul

Mosul districts liberated by Iraqi Security Forces (in green), as of 7 January 2016 [Ninevah Media Center]

A spokesman for the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) announced that CTS units reached the eastern bank of the Tigris River in central Mosul today, securing a damaged bridge over the river. The Tigris runs north-south through the center of the city. Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have made steady progress against stiff Daesh opposition since renewing offensive operations on 27 December 2016.

Though the battle is far from over, recent gains suggest that ISF might be winning the battle of attrition with the vastly outnumbered defenders. However, it likely will still be some time before ISF fully occupies and secures the city.

Economics of Warfare 7

Examining the seventh lecture from Professor Michael Spagat’s Economics of Warfare course that he gives at Royal Holloway University. It is posted on his blog Wars, Numbers and Human Losses at: https://mikespagat.wordpress.com/

This lecture, which starts by discussing the “Dirty War Index”, remains focused on civilian casualties. He presents on slide 4 the “Dirty War Index” (DWI), which is actually something we could have used for our insurgency work.

The link to the lecture is here: http://personal.rhul.ac.uk/uhte/014/Economics%20of%20Warfare/Lecture%207.pdf

We did something very similar in pages 88-92 in the section on “Use of Firepower” in America’s Modern Wars. On page 89 we have a chart with three columns tracking civilians casualties. They are 1) (civilians killed)/(CI/INS killed); 2) civilians killed/insurgents killed; and 3) total civilians killed/100,000 population. We only have data for nine cases (nine insurgencies). The first two formulations are ratios but the same data could be used to calculate an ersatz DWI. We then discussed the problem with Irish Loyalists Militias on pages 89-90 (using the exact same data as Dr. Spagat used on slide 6) and then we looked at 35 insurgencies compared to 1) rules of engagements, 2) civilians killed/insurgents kills, and 3) total civilians killed/100,00 population (pages 90-91). Our conclusions were (page 92):

In general, there does seem to be a pattern where insurgencies win more often if the number of civilians killed compared to the number of insurgents killed is greater than 10, but there is no statistical support for such an assumption.

This was a case where we needed to do a lot more work, but never got back to it (read: defense budget cuts and sequestration).

Slides 5 and 6 of Dr. Spagat’s lecture are worth looking at. You will note that in Colombia that while the guerrillas and government forces were responsible for their share of civilian casualties, it was the paramilitaries who were doing a lot of the bloodletting. Government ties to some of these paramilitaries have been an issue. As Dr. Spagat puts it (slide 7) “Their relationship with government forces is murky and controversial.” Slide 6 is from Northern Ireland. Again the “Loyalist Paramilities” are the worst offenders. Probably good policy to keep the Shiite militias out of Mosul.

On slide 10, Dr. Spagat switches from the rather depressing discussion of civilian casualties (which is a subject that needs to be discussed and analyzed more than it has) to a discussing of the “Benefits of Peace.” Because of the nature of our customers, we haven’t done a lot of work on peace…not that we don’t want to. He ends up looking at housing prices in Northern Ireland. Slide 13 has the total killings in Northern Ireland by quarter, although only from 1983 and on. The war was far more bloody in the early 1970s and the violence declined notably after that. The figures on slide 14 catches my attention because at one point in our insurgency studies we also looked at distribution of casualties by region in Northern Ireland, compared to Vietnam and compared to two other wars. We noted at the time that unequal distribution of casualties by geography was at a similar ratio between Northern Ireland and Vietnam. We did not go any further with this effort, because we needed a whole lot more cases and we could not see a pattern with what we had examined (and it took a lot of time). This effort was discussed in our report on terrain (Report I-12: http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/tdipub3.htm) but I am pretty sure I left it out of my book.

Anyhow, Figure 15 shows housing prices in Northern Ireland. Not particularly surprising, peace is good for housing prices. You probably could have guessed that without a statistical analysis. The rest of the slides just go into more depth on the statistics behind this (slides 17-19). Then there is a discussion on “sampling rare events” (slides 20-29). Note the mention of bootstrapping on slide 29: Bootstrapping_(statistics)

Iraqi Time

Nothing earthshaking here, but I just liked the article for its quote: “In terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time, this is going to take some time.”

Article is here: general-sees-islamic-states-capability-waning

A few highlights:

  1. ISIL is starting to run out of resources in the third month of the campaign.
  2. Second phase of the campaign started last week after a month of deadlock and is making slow progress.
  3. “They’ve got a finite amount of resource that are on the eastern side and the fact that their capability is waning indicates that those resources are starting to dwindle.”
  4. “…the Mosul campaign was on track, but ‘in terms of timeline, we’re on Iraqi time. This is going to take some time.'”

Anyhow, still not sure how ISIL is going to manage to pull anything positive out of this effort. With over 100,000 troops with air support, it is hard to imagine that the coalition is not going to take Mosul in the near future.

 

Mosul and ISF Combat Effectiveness

The situation in Mosul, 16-19 December 2016 (Institute for the Study of War)

After a period of “operational refit,” Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) waging battle with Daesh fighters for control of the city of Mosul launched a new phase of their advance on 29 December. The initial phase of the assault, which began on 17 October 2016, ground to a halt due to strong Daesh resistance and heavy casualties among the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service (CTS) troops spearheading the operation.

For the new offensive, the CTS was reinforced with additional Iraqi Army ground units, as well as an armored element of the Federal Police. Additional U.S. combat forces and advisors have also been moved closer to the front lines in support.

Although possessing an enormous manpower advantage over the Daesh defenders, ISF had managed to secure only one-quarter of the city in two months of combat. This is likely due to the fact that the only ISF elements that have demonstrated any offensive combat effectiveness have been the CTS and the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hash’d al Shaabi) Iraqi Shi’a militia mobilized by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in 2014. PMF brigades hold the western outskirts of the city, but thus far have been restrained from entering it for fear of provoking sectarian violence with the mostly Sunni residents.

Daesh defenders, believed to number only from 3,000-5,000 at the outset of the battle, have had the luxury of fighting against only one axis of advance and within urban terrain filled with trapped civilians, which they have used as human shields. They mounted a particularly effective counterattack against the CTS using vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs), which halted the initial offensive in mid-December. ISF casualties appear to be concentrated in the elite 1st Special Operations Brigade (the so-called “Golden Division”) of the CTS. An unnamed Pentagon source was quoted as stating that the Golden Division’s maneuver battalions had incurred “upwards of 50 percent casualties,” which, if sustained, would have rendered it combative ineffective in less than a month.

The Iraqi government has come to rely on the Golden Division to generate reliable offensive combat power. It spearheaded the attacks that recovered Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah earlier in the year. Originally formed in 2004 as the non-sectarian Iraqi Special Operations Forces brigade, the Golden Division was amalgamated into the CTS in 2007 along with specialized counterterrorism and national police elements. Although intended for irregular warfare, the CTS appears to be the only Iraqi military force capable of effective conventional offensive combat operations, likely due to higher level of combat effectiveness relative to the rest of the ISF, as well as its interoperability with U.S. and Coalition supporting forces.

Historically, the Iraqi Army has not demonstrated a high level of overall combat effectiveness. Trevor Dupuy’s analysis of the performance of the various combatants in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War ranked the Iraqi Army behind that of the Israelis, Jordanians, Egyptians, and Syrians. He estimated the Israelis to have a 3.43 to 1.00 combat effectiveness advantage over the Iraqis in 1973. Dupuy credited the Iraqis with improved effectiveness following the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War in his pre-war estimate of the outcome of the 1990-91 Gulf War. This turned out to be erroneous; overestimation of Iraqi combat effectiveness in part led Dupuy to predict a higher casualty rate for U.S. forces than actually occurred. The ineffective performance of the Iraqi Army in 2003 should have not surprised anyone.

The relative success of the CTS can be seen as either indicative of the general failure of the decade-long U.S. effort to rebuild an effective Iraqi military establishment, or as an exemplary success of the U.S. Special Operations Forces model for training and operating with indigenous military forces. Or both.