Mosul

By Cernig

There isn't much English language coverage of what's happening in Mosul, in marked contrast to the reams of stuff that was available on Basrah or Sadr City - but after reading everything I could find on Maliki's latest Napoleon-complex offensive, here's what I think is going down.

It seems to me that AQI melted away ahead of Maliki's offensive, which was telegraphed for a couple of months and had widespread publicity in the days leading up to the first sweep. These are the rump of AQI, the survivors of the Surge, and they're nobody's fools even if they're terrorists. Even Maliki's own people say that's what has happened - although the US military denies it.

So Maliki is contenting himself with another purpose - rounding up Baathists and non-violent malcontents he can label AQI. Over 1,000 have been arrested without much, if any, fight and the provincial governor says they've already released those who weren't AQI (they released 94). The US military seems just fine with this.

But in a revealing move it appears there were no Awakening groups involved on the government's side - they were deemed unuseable by the US local commander, who expected them to fight against Maliki's forces and each other if it was tried.

Col. Michael Bills, the commander for U.S. forces in Mosul, has ruled out using so-called Concerned Local Citizens (CLC), bands of irregulars working alongside American and Iraqi troops in parts of Baghdad, Anbar Province and other areas of Iraq. "You got such a melting pot it's difficult to even fathom trying to do a CLC up here," Bills said of the Mosul area, where the population is complex mix of Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups. The territory around Mosul has long been home to Kurds, Sunnis, Christians, Shi'ites, Yazidis and Turkmens. Bills fears any efforts to organize volunteer fighters to set against insurgents could backfire, igniting tensions among the disparate communities. "What ethnic group do you go after?" Bills said. "You just can't start something like that, because I think tensions will start between different CLC groups."

That's also made insurgents more difficult to dig out - the Sunni Awakening people have been invaluable sources of streetwise intel in the past. So Mosul, far from being a final accounting with AQI, is just another whack-a-mole operation with a very useful sideline in dissent supression and sectarian revenge for past injustices. Another Theatre-Of-COIN "victory" is in the making.