Iraq Prepares for New Fight against Post-Mosul Daesh

Local Editor

With Daesh's [Arabic acronym for "ISIS" / "ISIL"] "caliphate" seemingly nearing its downfall in Iraq, the country's security agencies are preparing for a different fight against the militants, shifting away from ground offensives to a focus on intelligence work, surgical airstrikes and a higher level of cooperation with the West.

The new strategy is designed to counter an expected move by Daesh away from holding territory and back to a more classic role as a dispersed, underground terror organization after it loses Mosul, its last major urban center in Iraq.

Already, the militants are laying the groundwork for a strategy of hiding in remote areas, carrying out attacks in Iraq and abroad and resorting to organized crime to bankroll operations, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said.

The immediate priority for Iraqi officials is to limit the number of militants who escape Mosul to go into hiding, they said. Longer term, they said, the fight against post-Mosul Daesh can only succeed if the border with Syria is secured.

Six officials - four from intelligence agencies and two from the Interior Ministry's counterterrorism agency - described the planning in interviews with The Associated Press. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the agencies' preparations.

"Tough days await our intelligence and security agencies when they start fighting a different ‘ISIS'," predicted Hisham al-Hashimi, an Iraqi security analyst.

Last weekend, US War Secretary Ash Carter said that the US and international forces will need to keep a presence in Iraq even after Daesh's fall "to make sure that, once defeated, ‘ISIL' stays defeated."

"We'll need to continue to counter foreign fighters trying to escape and ‘ISIL's' attempts to relocate or reinvent itself," he said.

It could still take weeks for Iraqi forces to fully retake the northern city of Mosul. But if the city falls, Daesh territory in Iraq that once stretched across a third of the country would be reduced to small pockets in the north and west that the military will likely be able to mop up relatively quickly. The group, however, will still have a cohesive, if eroding, stretch of territory in neighboring Syria.

Iraq is negotiating with several Western companies to buy surveillance equipment to monitor the long desert border with Syria, the officials said.

The equipment would beef up surveillance by Iraqi drones, they said. There are also plans to deploy units from the Popular Mobilization to help the army in patrolling the border, the officials said.

Iraq also wants to intervene against Daesh in Syria to ensure the group's de facto capital there, Raqqa, is retaken, a senior counterterrorism official said.

The counterterrorism official said Damascus had quietly given permission for Iraq to carry out airstrikes by drone or warplanes in Raqqa.

To curtail the impact on the West from a decentralized Daesh, the officials said Iraq had stepped up existing coordination and exchange of information with authorities in Western Europe, the US and Australia. The intention is to prevent attacks by sleeper cells and stop Western militants from returning home.

The counterterrorism agency had wanted the Mosul offensive to be delayed to give time to degrade Daesh before the full-fledged assault caused them to flee and disperse, the officials said.

"We had wanted them to stay put in Mosul, clustered together there while we hit them day after day with targeted airstrikes and intelligence operations," the senior counterterrorism officer said.

Instead, most senior and middle ranking Daesh operatives left Mosul after the offensive began in October, slipping into Syria, Turkey and Iraq's Kurdish region, the officials said. The group's top leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is among those who fled, and he is now believed to be in northwestern Iraq near the border or in Syria, they said.

They estimated that Daesh had between 4,500 and 6,000 militants fighting in Mosul, including members with administrative posts or serving in the "hesbah" - a sort of religious police - who were ordered to join the defense of the city.

But dozens of the group's Iraqi insurgents left with their families among the civilians fleeing the fighting, possibly with permission from local Daesh leaders, he said. The concern is that everyone who gets out will eventually be put in Daesh cells plotting future attacks.

"If 1,000 militants escape, and that's very possible since there are still escape routes open, that will be enough to terrorize not just Iraq, but the whole region," the counterterrorism official said.

The officials said the agencies had been gleaning information on Daesh's post-Mosul plans from informants and interrogations of captured militants.

After Mosul, Daesh plans to abandon military-style formations and instead operate in cells of up to 50 militants, the officials said. The cells would plot attacks on civilian targets, government complexes, military installations or prisons to free jailed Daesh members.

"The plan for what happens after Mosul is thorough, complete with a list of places to hide and how to secure supplies of food, water and fuel," said the counterterrorism official. He cited remote desert and rocky gorges in western and northwestern Iraq close to the Saudi and Syrian borders as likely refuges.

A glimpse of what could be in store came in October when Daesh militants and suicide bombers, believed to come from sleeper cells, attacked the oil city of Kirkuk, martyring at least 80 people. Last month, a suicide car bomber hit Shiite pilgrims returning from a major religious observance, martyring 92.

"The residual of this organization is going to be very lethal, very dangerous," Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi warned in Nov. 28 interview with the AP. "The unfortunate thing is that we have to be very successful every time. They only have to be successful one time to introduce havoc somewhere in the world."

Post-Mosul restructuring will not be trouble-free for Daesh, the officials said. It had already seen a notable decline in new recruits. It will lose the territorial depth that provided a population from which to draw militants and wide space to freely operate, whether rigging explosives for suicide attacks or developing chemical weapons.

It will also lose significant financial resources, including taxes it collected from Iraqis under its rule. It will likely increasingly fall back on other methods like kidnapping for ransom and running protection rackets, the officials said.

The group's track record of brutality while in power had also reduced the sympathy they once enjoyed among Iraqi Sunnis. But whether that trend continues depends on whether the government takes concrete action to bridge the Sunni-Shiite rift, the officials said.

Daesh had itself to be tenacious and resourceful.

Its forerunner, al-Qaeda in Iraq, survived near destruction during the US troop surge of 2007 and 2008. The militants retreated to remote parts of Iraq to regroup.

Michael W. Hanna, a Middle East expert with New York's Century Foundation and a longtime Iraq watcher, said Daesh had honed its survival tactics.

"‘ISIS' in Iraq is an old organization and it is prepared to go back to the desert, back to being both an insurgency and a terrorist group," said Hanna.

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team