U.S. Faces Tough Struggle on Ground to Oust ISIS
Michael R. Gordon, Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper
New York Times, September 19, 2014
WASHINGTON — The American air campaign to thwart the advance of fighters from the Islamic State has been the easy part of President Obama’s strategy in Iraq and Syria. Soon begins the next and much harder phase: rolling back their gains in Mosul, Falluja and other populated areas, which will require American advisers to train and coordinate airstrikes with Iraqi forces.
Pentagon officials are more willing than their counterparts at the White House to acknowledge that this will almost certainly require American Special Operations forces on the ground to call in airstrikes and provide tactical advice to Iraqi troops. “There is no one in this building who does not know that clearing out the cities will be much harder,” a senior Defense Department official said in an interview. “That’s when the rubber is going to meet the road.”
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this week described this phase as “extraordinarily complex.”
Urban warfare in Iraq has been challenging for the United States, which had 70 troops killed in the second battle of Falluja in 2004 and fought hard to regain control of cities like Mosul, Baquba and Baghdad. So it will be even harder for the Iraqis, who have so far proved ineffective in combating the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
Military officials say they plan to use Iraqi security forces, Kurdish fighters and local Sunnis — whom they hope to turn against the militants — to roll back the Islamic State’s gains. They see the Sunnis as playing a similar role to what played out in the Sunni awakening during the surge in Iraq.
Assembling those ground forces, however, will take time. General Dempsey said that of the 50 Iraqi brigades whose readiness the United States had closely examined, 26 “were assessed to be reputable partners,” with adequate equipment and leadership, to be loyal to the government and not overly sectarian.
But many of the Iraqi units will require training and re-equipping before they are ready to begin a major counteroffensive.
The United States is trying to institutionalize the Sunni tribal awakening by establishing new national guard units that it would have a crucial role in training and equipping. The idea is to avoid the need to send a largely Shiite army to Sunni areas and to win the allegiance of local Sunnis. In their attempt to seize urban areas from the Islamic State, the Iraqis’ firepower will be limited. On Saturday, Iraq’s new prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, said that the Iraqi military would not use artillery or carry out airstrikes in populated areas — an effort to reduce the risk of civilian casualties and avoid alienating the Sunni population.
A senior State Department official said Sunday that the Iraqi air force’s “targeting is not nearly as precise as ours, and they’ve made some real mistakes.”
“So that’s why Prime Minister Abadi yesterday announced that even in populated areas in which ISIL has control, we are not going to do airstrikes or artillery-type stuff because it could harm the civilians,” the official said.
It falls, then, to the United States and other allied nations to conduct the airstrikes, which will need to be carefully coordinated.
In the past week, the offensive strikes that Mr. Obama promised have started slowly, targeting a few scattered Sunni militant positions — a truck here, a small boat on the Euphrates there, an artillery position somewhere else — in what is known in the military as “plinking.”
American military advisers are already working closely with Iraqi battalions in the field and have not limited themselves to staying in Iraqi brigade headquarters, American officials said. But so far none have been used to call in airstrikes.
The operation to take back the Mosul Dam, in which fewer than 200 Iraqi Counterterrorism Service commandos played the critical role, along with Kurdish fighters, posed a particular challenge.
Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the Central Command, had recommended deploying American military advisers to coordinate airstrikes in support of Iraqi and Kurdish forces who had never worked together before and indeed spoke different languages.
Given Mr. Obama’s reluctance to put American advisers alongside Iraqi combat troops, a workaround was arranged, General Dempsey noted Tuesday in testimony at a Senate hearing. He said that the Kurds would pass targeting information on Islamic State positions to an operations center in Erbil manned by Iraqi and American troops, and they, in turn, would pass the information on to American aircraft. It was a bit of a Rube Goldberg command structure, but it worked.
But this arrangement, as General Dempsey signaled, is unlikely to be sufficient for the next, more challenging phase of rolling back the Islamic State’s gains in Iraqi cities.
In fact, General Austin said that air controllers would be needed. “He shares my view that there will be circumstances when we think that’ll be necessary, but we haven’t encountered one yet,” General Dempsey said of General Austin.
But the White House made clear on Wednesday that requests to use the advisers to call in airstrikes to provide tactical advice on the battlefield to Iraqi units would need to be approved by the president on a case-by-case basis.
In weighing such requests, the White House may have to choose between the increased risk to American personnel and the danger that without the use of advisers on the battlefield, the counteroffensive may stall.
The Iraq war provided a telling example of what can happen when the Iraqis operate largely on their own. In March 2008, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki decided to mount an operation to retake Basra called “Charge of the Knights.”
The Iraqi military and the Shiite militias fought to a bloody stalemate until the United States dispatched FA-18 jets, AC-130 gunships and Predator drones.
To help the Iraqis’ Basra campaign, American commanders also arranged for three rifle platoons from the 82nd Airborne to team with Iraqi battalions so they could call in airstrikes and back up the Iraqis. An Iraqi battalion sent from Anbar Province in the West deployed with its Marine advisers and also had success.
But even with American help, the counteroffensive against the Islamic State may confront an enemy that is rapidly adapting to the American airstrikes by hiding equipment and troops under trees and tarps, and eschewing many electronic communications that American intelligence services can intercept.
“They’re beginning to adapt now,” General Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.
And this is just the Iraqi part of the campaign. Attacking forces of the Islamic State in Syria will come later, but first the United States will have to train the Syrian rebels who will fight the militants on the ground.
General Dempsey said this week that Pentagon planners estimated that it would take eight to 12 months to train the first 5,400 soldiers; the goal is to train about 5,000 a year, Pentagon officials said.
But those numbers would be only the beginning of the forces the Pentagon believes will be necessary. General Dempsey said that American planners estimated that 12,000 personnel would be needed to control liberated areas in Syria and restore the border with Iraq.
The Central Intelligence Agency recently estimated that the Islamic State had 20,000 to 31,500 fighters, two-thirds of them based in Syria. The advance of the militants through Iraq led to the larger estimate.
David R. Shedd, acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said at a conference in Washington on Thursday that it was “very difficult to measure the size and capability of the truly committed.”
But some seasoned military officials have questioned whether the strategy that Mr. Obama and his advisers have developed will be sufficient to defeat the Islamic State.
“Unfortunately, the strategy in many ways will be made up on the fly,” said Gen. James N. Mattis, who retired from the Marine Corps and is a former head of Central Command. “It would be better if clearly defined political end states were objectively and persuasively conveyed at the outset.”
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