US, Iraq made no plans for Mosul after Daesh

Iraq and the US launched a crucial battle to liberate the Iraqi city of Mosul without determining how its volatile region will be governed once Daesh militants are ejected, US and other officials said.

US officials acknowledge gaps and risks in the plan for Mosul, amid worries that the defeat of Daesh in its de facto Iraqi capital could give way to sectarian score-settling and land grabs in the country’s ethnically mixed north.

But they argue that the alternative – waiting to first sort out Iraq’s fractious sectarian politics – is unrealistic. With Daesh hurting militarily, now is the time to strike, they say.

Plans for administering Mosul itself, and aiding hundreds of thousands of civilians who could flee the fighting are in place, Western and Iraqi officials say.

But being left for later, they say, are fundamental issues likely to determine Iraq’s future stability. Among them are bitterly contested territorial claims in the country’s north, including the divided city of Kirkuk and the disputed borders of the Kurds’ autonomous region.

In Mosul, it remains to be seen how power will be shared among the city’s Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and minority Turkmen, Christians, Yazidis and others.

“Some of those big-picture governance, territorial issues, are going to be pushed down the road,” a senior State Department official said.

Lukman Faily, Iraq’s ambassador to Washington from 2013 until earlier this year, said that while military planning is advanced, “on the politics, we still need to get our house in better shape.”

The United States has repeatedly found in recent years that the aftermath of war can prove more troublesome than the fighting itself.

Iraqi government forces, backed by air and ground support from the US-led coalition, yesterday launched the initial stages of the offensive to retake Mosul. The assault has been in preparation since July.

Fighting is expected to take weeks, if not months, as government forces, Shia and Sunni tribal fighters and Kurdish Peshmerga first encircle the city of more than 1.3 million and then attempt to oust between 4,000 and 8,000 Daesh militants.

“If we try to solve everything before Mosul, Daesh will never get out of Mosul. And this is really a war of momentum,” Brett McGurk, US President Barack Obama’s counter-Daesh envoy, told reporters this month.