Next up: Mosul

[Ransom]

The outcome in Syria today in the interests of the US?

Someone used to say no.

That individual today says yes.

This chaos ISIL causing in the ME making anyone safer?

Someone used to say yes.

That individual today says no.

Someone used to say stay out of it.

That individual doesn't say that anymore.

Reality and Ransom changed that individual's thinking

And we move on.

[waltky]

UN refugee agency bracing for up to 1.2 internally displaced Iraqis...

1.2 Million Iraqis Could Be Uprooted in Mosul Battle, U.N. Says
AUG. 23, 2016 - The United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday that it was bracing to accommodate as many as 1.2 million displaced Iraqis when the battle begins to retake Mosul from Islamic State militants, who overran the northern city more than two years ago.

A spokesman for the agency, Adrian Edwards, said it was scrambling to build encampments in six locations in northern Iraq to handle such an influx, which could inflate the country’s displaced-person population by more than a third. Mr. Edwards also said that “other shelter options are being prepared.” His announcement, at a regular news briefing in Geneva, the refugee agency’s headquarters, did not necessarily signify an imminent military operation to seize Mosul, about 250 miles north of Baghdad. But the announcement provided detail on the efforts to prepare for enormous new pressure on the Iraqi government to house and feed hundreds of thousands of Mosul residents when the fighting starts. “The humanitarian impact of a military offensive there is expected to be enormous,” Mr. Edwards said in remarks posted on the refugee agency’s website.

The Iraqi government has been warning for months that the battle to retake Mosul is coming. On Tuesday, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq said at a news conference in Baghdad that “Mosul will be liberated in 2016.” Iraq already faces one of the biggest internal displacement crises in the Middle East. Nearly 3.4 million people have fled their homes since January 2014, including families who have been uprooted multiple times. A battle for Mosul could increase that number by up to 1.2 million people, Mr. Edwards said. He coupled the warning with a plea for donations, saying the refugee agency’s Iraq budget of $584 million was only 38 percent funded as of Aug. 2. The United Nations “is doing what it can amid enormous challenges to build more camps to accommodate people and mitigate suffering, but additional land for camps and funding is still needed,” he said.

Mosul, once Iraq’s second-largest city with a population that reached about 2.5 million, was seized in June 2014 by Islamic State militants who routed government troops, many of whom fled in panic. The Mosul takeover was a humiliation for the Iraqi government and a warning for the United States and other Western powers about the potency of the Islamic State, which went on to capture more territory in Iraq. President Obama, who had withdrawn United States troops from Iraq in 2011, redeployed a limited number and authorized American airstrikes against Islamic State targets.

With the help of American airstrikes and assistance from other powers, including Iran, a conglomeration of Iraqi government forces and militias have since reclaimed the cities of Ramadi and Falluja from the Islamic State, leaving Mosul as the militant group’s last major redoubt in the country. Nonetheless, United States military officials have warned of what they describe as a grinding insurgency in the coming months to oust the Islamic State from Mosul and destroy the group’s ability to carry out suicide bombings and other deadly attacks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/24/wo...iraq.html?_r=0

[Peter1469]

Don't go far. Mosul will be liberated within 4 months. You guys need to rebuild it.

[Beevee]

Don't go far. Mosul will be liberated within 4 months. You guys need to rebuild it.

If it isn't postponed.......................................ag ain!

[Peter1469]

If it isn't postponed.......................................ag ain!

Still they shouldn't go far.

[Ransom]

Four months. Must mean the gun counting phase of the operation is over. Donttread, how many were there?

[Peter1469]

Battle for Mosul entering its final stage

After many months of delays and false starts, it finally appears that the campaign for Mosul is entering the final stage.

Earlier this month, Kurdish forces, known as peshmerga, launched an offensive to retake several villages east of the city. The capture of the air base at Qayyara, 40 miles south of Mosul, gives the Iraqis and their U.S. and international partners a strategic staging area for an assault against the city.


Kurdish officials have said they plan to advance to within about 10 miles of Mosul without entering it. That, they say, they'll leave to the Iraqi army; the peshmerga will play a supporting role.


Front-line peshmerga fighters expect a bloody, protracted and complicated fight ahead, notwithstanding a coalition assessment that enemy resistance is beginning to crumble.


Yet Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland, who recently gave up command of the U.S.-led anti-Islamic State coalition, was upbeat in recent remarks.
Islamic State fighters are becoming "even easier targets," he told reporters. The coalition has killed roughly 45,000 militants, and those remaining, an estimated 15,000 to 30,000, fight less effectively than in the past.

Read more at the link.

[Ransom]

Also last month, the Defense Department signed an agreement to supply the Kurdish forces with $415 million to pay stipends to fighters and to buy food, fuel, ammunition and other supplies.Peshmerga commanders said they desperately needed the added support to take on the enemy in Mosul.
"We need everything," Barzani said. "Money, ammunition, heavy machine guns."
Soldiers have been going three or four months at a time without pay, and while the peshmerga front lines are shelled daily by Islamic State mortars or rockets, the Kurds often don't have the ammunition to respond in kind, Barzani said.

US right in this.