Iraq: Daesh command in Mosul ‘effective’

Daesh has adopted a flexible command structure that has allowed it to remain “effective” and delegated command initiative to local fighters within their respective areas of Mosul, according to a Reuters report released today.

As Iraqi government forces advanced towards his eastern Mosul neighbourhood in November, a group of Daesh militants stormed Abu Rami’s home, put a gun to his head and told him and his family to get out immediately.

The militants, including a local man whose name he knew, brought with them a bearded comrade clutching a sniper rifle whom Abu Rami suspected was Russian or Chechen. The foreigner took up position in a rooftop chicken coop.

When Abu Rami returned 11 days later, the fighting had ended and the militants had slipped away, but his two-storey house was destroyed by an airstrike. His family is now distributed among relatives and friends across the city.

“Destruction occurs in a few moments, but rebuilding takes time,” he said outside the rubble of his home where men huddled around a well to collect water because pipes have been damaged.

The Mosul campaign, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of US and Iran-backed Iraqi government troops and militarised police, Kurdish Peshmerga and thousands of Shia jihadists, is the most complex battle in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

The government claims that nearly all of eastern Mosul is under its control three months into the offensive, although analysts have pointed out that there is a difference between “presence” and “control”.

With nowhere else to go, most residents have stayed in the city, though more than 100,000 have populated sparsely supplied refugee camps.

Residents told Reuters during a visit to the Muharibeen district yesterday how the battle played out for them, describing scenes likely repeated in one form or another across the city.

The militants hung curtains across roadways to try to obscure the view of Iraqi army marksmen as they dashed from houses to pray in a tan-coloured mosque where they also posted a sniper in the minaret, Abu Rami said.

They kept a car packed with explosives parked opposite his house for more than a week. When they deployed it to a main street, an army tank shelled it, destroying an adjacent building.

Daesh division of labour

When it launched the offensive in October, the Iraqi government hoped to retake Mosul – Daesh’s last major stronghold in the country and the largest urban centre anywhere in its self-styled caliphate spanning Iraq and neighbouring Syria – by the end of 2016.

But Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, having failed to reach his own objective, said in December it could now take another three months to drive the militants out – double the time he initially estimated and promised the Iraqi people.

Commanders have blamed their slow advance on the presence of up to 1.5 million residents and attempts to minimise destruction to homes and key infrastructure, but hundreds of civilians have already been killed and many areas heavily damaged.

Iraqi forces themselves have been accused of several grave human rights violations and war crimes, with MEMO breaking the harrowing story last year of children being beaten to death with hammers by sectarian Shia militants.

Abu Rami, a 54-year-old former government employee, described a division of labour among Daesh militants at the frontlines: a group that plants explosives, one that has snipers and another that serves as local guides.

The snipers are usually Russians, Chechens or Afghans, he said. The Iraqis, many from Mosul and the nearby city of Tel Afar, ride around on motorcycles telling them where to take up positions.

Abu Rami said he was surprised when the fair-skinned sniper who posted up in his house spoke to him in broken Arabic, saying: “For the sake of Allah, get out.”

“They do not know the area so the motorcycle guides the suicide car bomb [to its target] and tells the fighters, ‘You go here, you go there. Go detonate here'”, he said.

US Army Lieutenant-General Steve Townsend, commander of the international coalition backing Iraqi forces, told Reuters last week that Daesh’s local leadership had proven effective without a hierarchical chain of command.

But he said separate cells fighting in different neighbourhoods appeared increasingly unable to coordinate across different areas it controlled inside the city.

Another US military official said fighters the coalition observes moving skilfully across Mosul’s urban terrain usually turn out to be foreigners, and therefore not Iraqi.

According to another Muharibeen resident, who asked not to be named, Daesh will shoot from a position for several minutes until the military identifies the location. The militants often escape to another house through holes previously knocked through outer walls.

“Then there is bombardment to destroy the house, to destroy the sniper position,” he said. “But the sniper will pop up again here or there.”

Although the government appears to be familiar with Daesh tactics, that has not prevented it from launching devastating attacks that have reduced Mosul’s already tattered infrastructure to rubble.