WORLD Battle to Retake Iraqi City Looms as Test of Obama’s ISIS Strategy

Kurdish pesh merga forces north of Mosul last month. Reclaiming the city will require up to 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish troops, U.S. officials said. Credit Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images.

WASHINGTON — American intelligence agencies and the Pentagon are struggling to determine how difficult it will be to retake Mosul, the Islamic State’s de facto capital in Iraq, as planning intensifies for a battle that is becoming a major test of the Obama administration’s strategy to stop the spread of the terrorist group in the Middle East.

The assessment will be pivotal in driving important policy and military decisions that President Obama will need to make in the coming weeks, including whether the Pentagon will need to deploy teams of American ground forces to call in allied airstrikes and advise Iraqi troops on the battlefield on the challenges of urban warfare.

Reclaiming Mosul, which has a population of more than one million people and is Iraq’s second-largest city, will require 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi and Kurdish forces to clear it block by block, with many of the streets and buildings likely to be rigged with explosives, American officials said. The battle is planned for as early as April.

 

 

Kurdish pesh merga fighters kept watch during clashes with Islamic State militants on the outskirts of Mosul last month. Credit Reuters

The city is being held by 1,000 to 2,000 Islamic State militants, according to United States military estimates. It sits astride one of the major infiltration routes that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has used to ferry troops and supplies into northern Iraq from Syria.

American intelligence agencies say they do not yet know whether Islamic State fighters will dig in and defend Mosul to the death or whether, fearing encirclement, most fighters will slip out of the city for other Iraqi towns or cross the border into Syria, leaving behind a smaller force and booby-trapping buildings with bombs to tie down and bloody thousands of Iraqi troops.

“We are looking at all the things that are out there, i.e., what is the final enemy disposition in Mosul?” said a United States Central Command official who briefed reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. The briefing drew sharp criticism from Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss future operations, continued, “All those things will have to be considered in the final analysis, and then, ultimately, they will go to the president with those things, and he will make that decision.” Central Command oversees American military operations in the Middle East, and officials there are helping Iraqis in the war planning.

The plan to retake Mosul, which the Islamic State has controlled since June, faces an array of challenges. The strategy is to draw on five of the most experienced Iraqi Army brigades, about 10,000 troops in all, put them through several weeks of special training and then use them in conjunction with Kurdish pesh merga units and other forces to mount the main assault. But both American and Iraqi commanders have raised doubts about the readiness of Iraq’s ground forces, which have struggled to recapture smaller towns that pose far less of a challenge than Mosul.

Since American air power will be critical to helping the Iraqi and Kurdish forces advance, the main question Mr. Obama will have to answer is whether the challenges posed in retaking Mosul mean that teams of American joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, need to be on the ground so that the airstrikes can be delivered precisely.

These teams, if deployed, would most likely need to be protected by Special Operations forces. There would also need to be additional quick-reaction forces held in reserve for emergencies, as well as medical personnel and helicopters in case the Americans came under heavy fire, former commanders said.

Although Mr. Obama has sent Marines and Special Forces to train Iraqi and Kurdish troops and advise them at the brigade level, he has not approved their use on the battlefield to call in airstrikes or advise Iraqi forces in combat. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said he would ask the president for such authorization if needed.

In preparation for the assault on Mosul, the United States and its allies are trying to weaken the Islamic State by cutting its supply lines. Kurdish forces, backed by American-led air power, have recently positioned themselves near an important crossroads at Kiske, 25 miles west of Mosul. “The isolation of Mosul is going on now,” said the official at Central Command.

 

 

In addition, American officials took the unusual step on Thursday of announcing the timing of the battle and the number of Iraqi and Kurdish forces to be deployed. Openly discussing future military operations is normally off-limits to avoid aiding the enemy, but American officials said it was done this time to try to weaken the resolve of the Islamic State fighters and to spur Mosul’s residents to rise up against the occupiers and help the Iraqi ground forces.

That strategy angered Mr. McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who, with Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, sent a blistering letter to Mr. Obama on Friday denouncing the briefing for reporters. “Never in our memory can we recall an instance in which our military has knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies,” Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham wrote.

A defense official said Friday that the White House and Ashton B. Carter, the new defense secretary, “had no advance knowledge” of the briefing. Mr. Carter, speaking to reporters on Friday en route to Afghanistan, gave no date for the assault on Mosul. “Even if I knew exactly when that was going to be, I wouldn’t tell you,” he said.

American officials said it was possible that announcing the battle for Mosul ahead of time could prompt many of the Islamic State fighters to slip away and make the retaking of the city less of a fight — perhaps to the point that it might not be necessary to have Americans call in airstrikes and advise Iraqi troops on the battlefield. But the officials acknowledged that they did not know how the militants would respond. Some experts who recently visited Iraq, however, said that the Islamic State’s actions in the towns of Kobani in Syria and Baghdadi in Iraq’s Anbar Province did not suggest that the fighters would flee. They said the Islamic State would not only try to hold parts of Mosul but would also launch diversionary attacks against the Iraqi forces elsewhere.

“They are going to fight back hard,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “They are not only going to try to hold Mosul but will try to relieve the pressure by launching counteroffensives elsewhere.”

Michael Knights, an expert on Iraq at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said the Islamic State’s strength was in the western half of Mosul, which has important government buildings and is predominantly Arab. There are more Kurds in eastern Mosul. “My gut is that they continue doing an economy-of-force effort, screening and lively raiding, on the east bank until the Kurds get serious and push forward,” Mr. Knights said. “Then they fall back to the west and blow the bridges.”

“They’ll fight like devils for west Mosul, making the entire place into a huge harassment minefield full of unexploded car bombs, roadside I.E.D.s and masses of fake I.E.D.s,” he added.

The battle, he said, could be a slugfest, reminiscent of the epic 2004 battle for Falluja in the Iraq war, unless local residents or neighboring tribes took matters into their own hands, or the Americans and Iraqis had an effective covert program to undermine the Islamic State’s defenses from within.

Another challenge will come if the city is retaken. While Mosul is overwhelmingly Sunni, the Iraqi attacking force is likely to be overwhelming Shiite, which may create friction with the local population. The Sunni Arab population could be alienated if their neighborhoods were held by Shiite-dominated units or pesh merga forces.

The plan calls for introducing a stabilizing force that would be composed of former Mosul police officers and Sunni tribal fighters. But it is unclear how synchronized this effort will be.

“It may well be the Iraqi forces are ready to assault Mosul in a couple of months,” said one European military officer who had been briefed on some of the battle planning. “But what comes next, who holds the ground taken, that could be just as difficult.”

CREDIT : Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Muslim Leaders in U.S. Seek to Counteract Extremist Recruiters

 Imam Mohamed Magid, at the All Dulles Area Muslim Society in Sterling, Va. The imam said he has persuaded several young men to abandon their plans to join extremists and fight overseas.

STERLING, Va. — Imam Mohamed Magid tries to stay in regular contact with the teenager who came to him a few months ago — at his family’s urging — to discuss how he was being wooed by online recruiters working for the Islamic State, the extremist group in Syria and Iraq.

But the imam, a scholar bursting with charm and authority, has struggled to compete. Though he has successfully intervened in the cases of five other young men, persuading them to abandon plans to fight overseas, the Islamic State’s recruiting efforts have become even more disturbing, he said, and nonstop.

“The recruiters wouldn’t leave him alone,” Imam Magid said of the young man he met with recently. “They were on social media with him at all hours, they tweet him at night, first thing in the morning. If I talk to him for an hour, they undo him in two hours.”

President Obama on Wednesday described the fight against violent extremism as a “generational challenge” that would require the cooperation of governments, religious leaders, educators and law enforcement. But even before he called on more than 60 nations to join the effort, the rise of the Islamic State and the attacks by homegrown terrorists in Paris, Ottawa, Copenhagen and Sydney, Australia, had jolted American Muslims into action.

Humera Khan, the founder of Muflehun, a think tank that focuses on countering violent extremism, during a youth leadership and safety conference in Avon, Conn., in November. 

Muslim leaders here and elsewhere have already started organizing or expanding prevention programs and discussions on countering violent extremism, often with assistance from law enforcement officials and trained counter-recruiters who emphasize that the Internet’s dangers for young Muslims now go far beyond pornography.

With the Islamic State in particular deploying savvy online appeals to adolescents alongside videos of horrific executions, the sense of urgency has grown. Though some Muslim leaders still resist cooperating with government, fearing that they would be contributing to religious profiling and anti-Muslim bigotry, many have been spurred to respond as they have come into contact with religiously ardent youths, who feel alienated by life in the West and admit that they have been vulnerable to the Islamic State’s invitation to help build a puritanical utopia.

“The number is small, but one person who gets radicalized is one too many,” said Rizwan Jaka, a father of six and the board chairman of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, where Imam Magid is the spiritual leader. “It’s a balancing act: We have to make sure our youth are not stereotyped in any way, but we’re still dealing with the real issue of insulating them from any potential threat of radicalization.”

In practice, it often means one-on-one conversation with Muslims like Amir, a 22-year-old computer programmer in Virginia who said he was initially drawn to extremist videos from the Islamic State because he was a new convert struggling with how to live out his faith in the United States. He said he chafed at having to work in an office with Muslim women who covered their heads but wore clothing he considered too tight. He also did not like hearing music or seeing photographs of people on the walls, or advertisements for credit cards, which he said Islam strictly forbids.

 “Every time I mentioned it, no one heard me out,” he said. “I definitely felt like a stranger.”

He said his disenchantment with the Islamic State began when the extremist group beheaded Peter Kassig, who reports said was a Muslim convert, and later executed a Jordanian pilot. Amir then had some long talks with Imam Magid, who pointed him to passages in the Quran that forbid killing other Muslims, and innocent women and children. Amir concluded that the Islamic State was only sowing chaos and hatred, which was abhorred by the Prophet Muhammad.

“The Islamic State once looked like eye candy to me,” said Amir, who was willing to be identified only by his first name because he did not want to attract the attention of extremists. “But now I think they are deviants.”

Imam Magid described Amir as “the kind of person who is vulnerable to ISIS” — an alienated young Muslim with a black-and-white worldview, looking for purpose and adventure.

But, he added, it is often hard to identify which people are most at risk, and how to make them see the forces of manipulation that may be in play.

Here in suburban Virginia and in many other communities where generations of Muslims have been settled for decades, the threat still feels remote. Many are professionals whose children are so enmeshed in American culture that they are more likely to spend time at the mall or the soccer field than watching extremist videos. And many have been especially active in mosques along with their families, which seems to diminish the likelihood of extremism; many homegrown extremists in the West were converts who had little exposure to, or education in, the faith.

But parents and religious leaders are struggling with just how concerned they should be, and where to focus their efforts. Imam Magid, who is in regular communication with the F.B.I. and other law enforcement agencies, said the young men he had counseled came from a variety of family backgrounds.

Humera Khan, the founder of Muflehun, a think tank based in Washington that focuses on countering violent extremism, said that, increasingly, there is no consistent profile of those who are targeted for recruitment or drawn to Islamic extremists.

“There are no patterns, and that’s making it harder for everyone,” she said in an interview in Virginia late last month. “They can come from every ethnic, socioeconomic group, any geographic area. But they are more often men than women, and they’re getting younger.”

Law enforcement officials estimate that about 150 Americans have traveled, or tried to travel, to fight in Syria. That is fewer than in France, where 1,000 people are estimated to have gone to Syria, and England, which has counted about 600, not including those who were in touch with extremists online and decided not to join.

Imam Magid said that in addition to those he has talked out of going, he knows of one young Muslim from Virginia who recently left to join the Islamic State in Syria. (He said he had never met this man nor had a chance to dissuade him.)

In Chicago in October, two brothers, ages 19 and 16, and their 17-year-old sister were detained at the airport on their way to Turkey to join the Islamic State. Three girls from Denver, one as young as 15, were stopped at an airport in Germany the same month, on their way to join militants in Syria.

All were reportedly recruited over the Internet. And that has provoked new levels of introspection, both private and public, among American Muslims of all ages.

At a forum for Muslim millennials in Washington sponsored by the Muslim Public Affairs Council last year, college students and Muslim leaders speculated about why a group as barbaric as the Islamic State had successfully attracted any Muslims at all from the West.

“ISIS says: ‘Come here. We’ve got ripped warriors,’  ” said Imam Suhaib Webb, a popular Muslim leader who moved from Boston to the Washington area last month. “It’s a very simplistic response, but it’s somewhat effective.”

He said that in more than 15 years as an imam, he had encountered only five Muslims who were considering whether they should join violent militant groups, but that none of them had actually left the United States to fight.

“They were all males,” said Imam Webb, and “they all had daddy issues.” He added, “They were not really drawn to this on theological grounds.”

Ms. Khan, who has four degrees from M.I.T., left lucrative consulting work to develop a prevention program that addresses extremism and the way that technology can be used for manipulation.

At one of her events last year, about 30 young Muslims, both high school and middle school students, gathered at the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center in Avon, Conn., for what was billed as a “cybersafety workshop,” with Ms. Khan moving swiftly from how to detect online pedophiles to how to detect Islamist extremists.

“They are telling you, ‘Let’s go fight.’ They are asking you to share gruesome images,” said Ms. Khan, who wore a blue floral-print head scarf. “Be very careful. These people are not your friends.”

She told the students — who were quick to raise their hands and ask questions — to avoid contact with strangers online, or with anyone who demands secrecy. The sexual predators are usually male, she told them, but the extremist recruiters can be male or female, and some of them can be, or can pretend to be, teenagers, too. Her presentation included a picture of a wolf zipped into a sheep’s skin.

“Have you guys heard of grooming?” she asked them, using a term more often used in relation to sexual predators. “They will try to be your friend. They will be nice to you, spend lots of time with you. Some of them will be sending you gifts.”

Programs like this have not been embraced as a widespread priority by American Muslims, at least until recently, in part because the problem seemed to be overseas, not here, Muslim leaders say. And since many American Muslims are immigrants or African-Americans, there is substantial fear and suspicion of law enforcement officials, along with simple defensiveness and denial.

 “The family says, ‘It’s not going to happen to me,’  ” said M. Saud Anwar, a pulmonologist and the first Muslim to be elected as a mayor in Connecticut, where he serves South Windsor.

Imam Magid, speaking upstairs at his Muslim center while a team of Muslim girls pounded out a basketball game below, said that real prevention meant programs that give young people as much purpose and inspiration as extremists promise.

Once young Muslims buy into the ideology, he said, it’s very hard to pry them loose. “You have to reach them before it happens.”

Some of the Muslim parents in Avon, Conn., also said they were still trying to grasp how they could help. At one point, in a meeting at the Farmington Valley American Muslim Center with prosecutors, the police and an F.B.I. agent, Dr. Atique A. Mirza, a cardiologist and founding board member of the center, pointedly asked what they were up against. “What’s the proportion of recruiters to counter-recruiters?” he asked Ms. Khan.

Globally, she said, “the recruiters are orders of magnitude more.”

“It’s pathetic,” she said. “They are running circles around us.”

 Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Time.

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Tanko Yakasai Statement Over Obasanjo’s Comments Against Jonathan.

 Elder statesman and Political Adviser to ex-President Shehu Shagari in the Second Republic, Alhaji Tanko Yakasai has berated former President Olusegun Obasanjo over comments credited to him in Dutse on Democracy Day calling for a change of leadership and describing President Ggoodluck Jonathan’s government as a failure.

Obasanjo who delivered a key-note address during the opening ceremony of the first Jigawa Investment and Economic Summit threw jibes at Jonathan’s administration and made comments suggesting his endorsement of Governor Sule Lamido come 2015 Presidential Election.

The Presidency is angry with Chief Obasanjo not only because he shunned the Democracy Day celebration in Aso Rock and chose to spend the day in Dutse Jigawa state, but because the former President used the occasion to vent his anger on President Jonathan who of late have been keeping arms length from Obasanjo. However, some eminent Nigerians have continued to condemn Obasanjo’s statement against President Jonathan on Democracy Day and among them is Yakasai.

Yakasai in a PressStatement made available to our correspondent in Kano Quoted Obasanjo’sill-conceived comment against Jonathan thus: “you can help someone to get a job but you can’thelp that person do the job,” and wondered why Obasanjo should use such“unpalatable utterances” against President Jonathan.

“The disagreeable utterances of our former President, General Olusegun Obasanjo ostensibly directed on President Goodluck Jonathan which he made in the cause of his speech as special guest of honour at D’dutse, where he was reported to have said ‘you can help someone to get a job but you can’t help that person do the job.’ He also used the occasion to underrate the achievements of the Jonathan administration especially in the area of macro-economic growth.

“The former President who was himself in office for eight years was also reported to have said that the road that leads into Dutse is better than the Lagos-Ibadan express way, forgetting that the two roads he referred to are all federal roads, as if that blame should go to the present federal administration, which has only been in office for two years.

“General Obasanjo being a former President and high-ranking leader of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which is the party in power at the Federal level in the country has every opportunity to seek audience with President Goodluck Jonathan and either offer him whatever advice he has to offer or criticize any policy of his administration that he has cause to disagree with. I think that is what is expected of any statesman, particularly people of the caliber of General Obasanjo.

“People close to him say when ever General Obasanjo disagrees with a person, he will carry the fight to his place of worship, to his dining table and sometimes, he will even be fighting the person in his dream. He is reported to be unforgiving and his method of disagreement with people is sometimes regarded as a matter of life and death.

“To me as a patriotic Nigerian, a democracy day celebration is hardly a suitable occasion for any citizen to make a personal attack on his country’s leader. Whatever differences exist between them, such should have been solved amicably. General Obasanjo and I enjoy tremendous goodwill and mutual respect.

“I respect him as the former President of my country, and he accords me some measure of respect as his elder. It is in this spirit that I would like to appeal to the former President to pursue political differences with some decency and decorum. That is what normally is expected of a man of General Obasanjo’s caliber.

“Despite our difference with NPC leaders during the First Republic, we NEPU leaders as members of the opposition to the NPC never took our political differences with Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa or Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto to the level of attacking their personalities. In the light of this and as a veteran politician, I would appeal to President Obasanjo to adopt decorum, tolerance and statesmanship standard in the pursuit of his political differences with others. This is the most honourable path for a man of his stature,” Yakasai concluded.