Who Takes Over After IS?

But none of these plans have come to fruition. The al-Abadi government doesn't seem to have any reasonable or powerful contacts within the cities that have been liberated that could help in the long term and, in the short term, logic dictates that if the Shiite Muslim forces withdraw the IS fighters will return.

“The army has units like the Golden Division and other rapid reaction forces that are capable of liberating areas from the IS group,” Colonel Jafar Mohammedawi told NIQASH. “But those forces cannot maintain control over the liberated territories for a long time. It's not really the army's job. Rather it's the job of the local police and forces that are trusted by the local population. Unfortunately,” the officer noted, “there is often no active police force anymore. So we are actually losing some of the places we liberated.”

Maintaining control over terrain once the IS group has been expelled requires a large military force to remain there until local security can be arranged. But doing this reduces the chance to fight the IS group and keep winning back territory. It also gives the IS group more time to organise sleeper cells that can move undetected through the local population and launch attacks on pro-government forces and locals.

And the longer the mostly Shiite Muslim forces stay in mostly Sunni Muslim areas, the more opportunity there is for revenge attacks and persecution of the civilian population, which again, will complicate matters even further.

What is missing right now in Iraq is forward planning – if the Iraqi government could send in pro-government forces, re-take terrain from the IS group and then swiftly leave again, handing responsibility over to some kind of National Guard, then there's no doubt ordinary Iraqis would be in a much better position to savour this wave of victories against the extremists.

(Terrorism image via Shutterstock)