The military battle for Mosul may have begun, but the real battle has yet to start

Nobody I’ve spoken to about the recently-launched battle for Mosul is in a particularly optimistic mood. The Iraqi soldiers are nervous because they know from bitter previous experience how dangerous Daesh can make a city with their adept use of booby traps. The UN is irritated because half of the money that it’s been promised by the international community hasn’t been delivered. And civil society humanitarians are troubled by the way that most Mosul refugees are likely to stream south, away from the unwelcoming Kurds to the north. South, however, is where far too few aid camps have been set up. To put it bluntly, the aid that Mosul’s refugees will need is in the wrong place.

What seems to have happened is that the military planners — yet again — have looked at humanitarian planning only as an afterthought. “They took months to plan the re-taking of Fallujah,” one senior aid worker who is now on the outskirts of Mosul told me, “and we were called in at the last minute.” He explained the weeks of delays by the government in Baghdad, which prevented convoys of food and water being moved in towards the city so that camps being set up by the UN could be filled with supplies by independent aid organisations.

Families arrived exhausted from the inner areas of Fallujah, having picked their way through Daesh-laid minefields or seeing their families hunted down by militants as they attempted to flee. They were greeted by a “camp” in name only; no tents were available for a week, and the supplies of food and water were pitiful. At least, though, the aid was in the right place.

In Mosul, civilian Kurdish leaders don’t want the latest wave of refugees, the majority of whom are now Sunni Muslims, to use valuable resources in what they hope will be a future state of Kurdistan, so the borders are sealed against them. Furthermore, Sunnis from Mosul view the Hashd Al-Shaabi or Popular Mobilisation Force with almost as much trepidation as Daesh fighters. The Shia militants are thought to be responsible for the disappearance and torture of hundreds of civilians after the battle for Fallujah subsided; they are based to the north and east.

To the west are only more Daesh fighters, although fears of reprisals from both Kurdish and Hashd fighters may well mean that a small number of Sunnis will opt to stay under so-called “Islamic State” rule. Others will be forced to do so, as human shields.

The majority, though, will look to the south and hope to make it to Tikrit or Kirkuk. However, Daesh still controls much of those areas, and if it isn’t Daesh preventing aid from moving into the right places, cack-handed administration from Baghdad is. Again, that was a lesson that could have been learned from Fallujah, where the necessary paperwork and assurances could take weeks to arrive; even then, when humanitarians arrived at each checkpoint on the road from Baghdad, an individual commander might slow progress for hours or even days. To avoid being caught in this sort of muddle again, most aid organisations have opted to set up camps in the north, behind the Kurdish checkpoints that are turning away Mosul refugees. It is a strategy born out of frustration. Only a handful of aid organisations are based in the south, often those with higher proportions of Iraqi workers who are better connected to the government.

In essence, the situation in both Fallujah and Mosul speaks of the fundamental problem with efforts to stabilise the Middle East. War doesn’t always bring stability; if it does, it brings stability only for as long as the food, water and shelter lasts after the last bullet has been fired. Until we integrate military and humanitarian efforts more closely, treating them with equal importance instead of the latter being an inconvenient afterthought, problems will continue.

In Fallujah there was a relatively homogeneous population and broad agreement about who should and should not run the city afterwards. In Mosul, the various Kurdish, Iraqi Shia (some sponsored by Iran) and Sunni groups; the Turks, the US and British special forces; the helicopter gunships from Baghdad and the fighter jets and Reaper drones from abroad, all represent competing interests in the future of the city. How long will it take for those interests to decide amongst themselves, and how much longer will that prolong the secondary status of the refugees? Time will tell; the military battle has begun, but the real battle is yet to get started.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.