U.S. official: Mission to retake Mosul to begin in April or May
WASHINGTON – The operation to retake Iraq’s second-largest city from Islamic State militants will likely begin in April or May and will involve about 12 Iraqi brigades, or between 20,000 and 25,000 troops, a senior U.S. military official said Thursday.
Laying out details of the expected Mosul operation for the first time, the official from U.S. Central Command said five Iraqi Army brigades will soon go through coalition training in Iraq to prepare for the mission. Those five would make up the core fighting force that would launch the attack, but they would be supplemented by three smaller brigades serving as reserve forces, along with three Peshmerga brigades who would contain the Islamic State fighters from the north and west.
The Peshmerga are Kurdish forces from northern Iraq.
The official said there also would be a Mosul fighting force, largely made up of former Mosul police and tribal forces, who would have to be ready to go back into the city once the army units clear out the Islamic State fighters.
Included in the force would be a brigade of Iraqi counterterrorism forces who have been trained by U.S. special operations forces. The brigades include roughly 2,000 troops each. The official was not authorized to discuss the operation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
It wasn’t immediately clear why the Pentagon would publicly disclose a major military operation so far in advance unless it was intended, at least in part, to rattle the estimated 2,000 Sunni fighters believed to hold the northern Iraqi city.
The Islamic State group calls Mosul, a city of 1.4 million people, a capital of its self-declared caliphate, or Islamic empire. Retaking it from the militants and their supporters could involve bitter house-to-house fighting in a crowded urban environment.
“Mosul will not be easy,” the U.S. official said. “It’s going to be a difficult fight.”
Islamic State militants overtook Mosul last June, as the group marched across large sections of Iraq and Syria, sending Iraqi forces fleeing. At this point, officials estimate there are between 1,000 to 2,000 Islamic State insurgents in the city of Mosul.
The U.S. official said Central Command hopes to launch the attack before the heat of summer and before the June 17 start of the Islamic holiday month of Ramadan.
“By the same token, if they’re (Iraqi forces) not ready, if the conditions are not set, if all the equipment they need is not physically there and they (are not) trained to a degree in which they will be successful, we have not closed the door on” delaying the mission, the official said.
The official said the U.S. will provide military support for the operation, including training, air support, intelligence and surveillance. The official said there has been no decision made yet on whether to send in some U.S. ground troops to help call in airstrikes.
Under the plan, the approximately 3,200 Iraqi forces that have completed the training already or are going through it now would replace the five main brigades wherever they are now, and those five units would then go through several weeks of final training before the Mosul operation begins.
The official also revealed for the first time that Qatar has agreed to host a training site for coalition forces to train moderate Syrian rebels who would return to Syria to fight the Islamic State forces there. Other sites are in Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
The training facility in Jordan is ready to go. The technical agreement on the Turkey training site was signed Thursday, and it is nearly ready. The facility in Saudi Arabia will be ready to open in one to three months, and the site in Qatar will be finished in six to nine months, the official said.
The U.S. and other coalition nations will train the Syrian fighters so they can return to their own country and battle the Islamic State group.