Feb. 19, 2015

ISIS captured Mosul, Iraq, in June 2014

WASHINGTON – The United States has laid out a battle plan to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul in an April-to-May time frame, using some 20,000 to 25,000 Iraqi troops who currently are being trained, a highly unusual disclosure that one intelligence source told WND is “pure lunacy.”

In a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon, a U.S. Central Command official said brigades of Iraqis along with Kurdish peshmerga forces and Sunni militia will seek to take back Iraq’s second largest city from ISIS, which has held it since June.

The half-hour briefing attended by WND and other media outlets was given on condition that the official could not be identified.

The disclosure surprised many on the call who wondered why details would be released months ahead of the planned offensive.

An intelligence source who spoke to WND also on condition that his identity not be revealed called the disclosure “pure lunacy.”

The source referred to previous disclosures in advance of an attack that gave enemy forces in Iraq time to set up improvised explosive devices.

The Pentagon briefer said that all training and equipping of Iraqi forces now under way will be for taking back Mosul. He said that some six brigades of equipment now are in place in preparation for the expected Mosul offensive in April or May.

“There are still a lot of things that need to come together, and as we dialogue with our Iraqi counterparts, we want them to go in that time frame; because as you get into Ramadan and the summer and the heat, it becomes problematic if you go much later than that,” he said.

“By the same token, if they’re not ready, if the conditions are not set, if all the equipment they need isn’t physically there to the degree that will be successful, we have not closed the door on continuing to slide [the time frame] to the right,” he said.

“And, so, although we would like [the battle for Mosul] to occur in the April-May time frame, that decision will still have to be one we will have to contend with in the future.”

In preparation for the Mosul operation, the briefer said the U.S. will provide the “full range of military options that we have given [the Iraqis] and continue to give them every day from the training and equipping and the logistical support we help them with, the air support, the intel, the ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) – that full range and complement that we have been doing now that has proven very successful when we have the ability to plan, rehearse side-by-side and then execute have been deemed successful.”

The Central Command official said the military campaign against ISIS “remains on track.” He said the ISIS advance, especially in Iraq, was “generally holding as we had planned.”

Efforts now are under way, he said, to train Iraqi forces and to prepare to train Syrian forces “which will become a reality here very soon” in an effort to degrade ISIS’ capability.

He said it was known that the “degrade phase” alone would be a long period of time. But, he added, regarding the “aggregate effect on the enemy, we believe that we may even be slightly ahead in the campaign.”

He affirmed ISIS is “in decline.”

Central Command’s assessment is that the anti-ISIS coalition has largely impeded the jihadist army’s ability to operate unconventionally, its ability to govern its territory and its media campaign to “influence the masses.”

He pointed out that the support of other jihadist groups in non-contiguous areas, such as North Africa, doesn’t improve its capacity though it does provide “leadership and inspiration.”

He said that some three-quarters of a division of equipment has been removed so far from the battlefield.

“It is no longer there and available to him,” the briefer said, referring to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

ISIS is having a “very difficult time seizing and holding additional terrain than what it has right now,” he said.

He said the air campaign has had “great effect,” with about 2,500 airstrikes carried out, and Iraqi forces already have taken back about 500 square miles of terrain from ISIS.

As for ISIS’ takeover of the city of al-Baghdadi last week, the briefer said in the “operational sense” ISIS is in a defensive mode, but it doesn’t mean that ISIS cannot conduct “limited and/or isolated offensive operations.”

“So, in the aggregate, [ISIS] is in the defense, it is in decline; but it’s not because of his freedom of movement.

ISIS, he said, still lacks clear order and safe haven that it has in Syria in its ability to migrate back and forth that still gives him that micro offensive capability,” the briefer said.

He said ISIS is in a zero-sum-gain environment.

If it were, for example, to put a thousand fighters back in Kobani along the Syria-Turkey border, it means ISIS “would not be doing something somewhere else.”

“In total,” he said, “our effects are outpacing its ability to regenerate.”

 

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