Defense secretary says attack on Raqqa will begin ‘in the next few weeks’ as US seeks to deprive Isis of its capitals in Iraq and Syria almost simultaneously
Isis militants hold up their weapons and wave flags on their vehicles in a convoy on a road leading to Iraq, in Raqqa, Syria.
Before Iraqi forces and their US backers have set foot in Mosul, the US and its allies have begun preparations to imminently wrest the Syrian city of Raqqa from the Islamic State, a momentous decision aimed at destroying what is left of Isis’s self-declared caliphate.
Although senior US defense officials and military officers insisted that “overlapping” operations to capture both cities from Isis had always been planned, preparations to take Raqqa are proceeding with “urgency”, the US commander in Iraq said on Wednesday, because of a credible threat of retaliatory Isis terrorism outside the Middle East.
Accordingly, US military officials planning the Raqqa fight have yet to resolve major geopolitical complications within their own coalition, particularly those involving the Kurdish force the US has relied upon in Syria and its enemy, Nato ally Turkey, which wants a substantial role in the operation.
The US defense chief, Ashton Carter, meeting in Paris with his counterparts in the anti-Isis coalition, vowed that Iraqi forces, Syrian Arab and Kurdish allies and US special operations troops and airpower could take away Isis’s Iraqi and Syrian capitals practically simultaneously.
Isis seize and kill dozens in strongholds around Mosul to quell uprising
“We’ve planned for that, and we have the resources for both,” Carter told NBC News early Wednesday, saying an attack on Raqqa would commence “in the next few weeks”.
Beginning in January, Carter set a goal for the US military of taking both strongholds away from Isis in 2016, a timetable publicly doubted by his own defense intelligence chief. If successful, the assault would leave Isis with little of the Iraqi and Syrian territory it has declared, to the shock of the world, as its caliphate.
“Yes, there will be overlap, and that’s part of our plan and we are prepared for that. And second, there’s no delay. This is proceeding on plan, even as Mosul is proceeding on plan,” Carter said at a Tuesday press conference in Paris.
But the US commander in Iraq and Syria, army Lt Gen Stephen Townsend, said the US had “a sense of urgency” behind the imminent move to seize Raqqa because of intelligence indicating a planned attack elsewhere.
“Intelligence feeds tell us there is significant external operations planning taking place, centralized in Raqqa,” Townsend told reporters, though it is unclear to the US how imminent any attacks are. While Townsend denied accelerating planning to attack Isis’s Syrian capital, he said it was “important” to advance “on a pretty short timeline”.
But the coalition has yet to make major decisions about a battle the US anticipates will be bloody and take longer than the Mosul offensive. It has yet to decide if it needs to fully encircle Raqqa in order to isolate the city at the outset of the fight. It is still training forces, particularly local Arab forces, needed to capture and hold Raqqa with an assault force much smaller than the tens of thousands of troops marching on Mosul. And, Townsend conceded, the US has not settled a “tough” problem about keeping both the Turks and their Kurdish enemies – particularly the fighters known as YPG that Turkey considers terrorists – on board.
Townsend indicated that at least for the initial stage of the Raqqa operation, he was inclined to stick with involving the Kurds, since “the only force that is capable on any near-term timeline is the Syrian Democratic Forces, of which the YPG are a significant portion”.
Asked if the US and Turkish governments were at odds over Raqqa, Townsend said: “We may have differences of opinion [over] how to prosecute this operation coming up … We’re going to go with who’s willing to go soon.”
Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga irregulars, backed by US special operations forces on the ground and warplanes overhead, have advanced to the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq’s second city. Defense officials have braced for fierce urban combat within the city itself, where thousands of civilians still reside and are likely to find themselves in the crossfire, and Townsend said he expected similarly tough fighting in Raqqa.
Townsend has designated Mosul “the main effort”, he said, and accordingly prioritized his airpower, artillery and other assets for supporting that fight. It is unclear whether that will remain the case for simultaneous fighting in Mosul and Raqqa.
Isis is showing signs of tactical innovation with what has heretofore been a US battlefield advantage: drones. Townsend said that while Isis’s “extensive” small-drone usage is mostly crude and used for reconnaissance, it managed to fake a downing, in order to lure an enemy into an explosion.
Isis’s drone use is “not episodic or sporadic, it’s relatively constant and creative”, Townsend said.
The fall of the Isis caliphate has been the central goal of the third US war in Iraq, with its adjunct across the border in Syria, since its inception in August 2014. But senior US intelligence officials have cautioned for months that it will be insufficient for the destruction the jihadist group.
James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, said in a Tuesday discussion that Isis’s history was defined by enough “resilience and flexibility” to suggest its reversion to a terrorist or guerrilla force in the dozens of countries in which it operates on a smaller scale.
After the caliphate, Clapper said, using an alternative acronym for Isis, “what then does Isil – what form does it take after that? Because it is probably not going to go away, and it’ll morph into something else or other similar extremist groups will be spawned.”
In Paris, Carter provided an unusual level of public disclosure about US anticipation for that subsequent mutation. The secretive elite military force that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, rarely discussed openly, has been tasked with assaulting Isis’s attempts at exfiltrating militants from Iraq and Syria and carrying out terrorist attacks abroad.
“We have put our joint special operations command in the lead of countering Isil’s external operations. And we have already achieved very significant results both in reducing the flow of foreign fighters and removing Isil’s leaders from the battlefield,” Carter said.
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