Assessing the War on ISIS

The third measure would be to increase the number of foreign fighters deployed in Iraq.

Most military figures agreed that the number of foreign fighters training and assisting local forces, such as Iraqi and Kurdish forces, should be increased. Currently, the United States has some 3,500 troops in Iraq, mostly working as advisers and trainers for the country's security forces. According to Centcom, coalition troops from Italy, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and Finland have also trained approximately 2,500 peshmerga soldiers at the Kurdistan Training Cooperation Center since January.

The Combined Joint Force Land Component Command in Iraq has trained more than 11,000 Iraqi security force personnel since January. Kurdish MP Ari Harsin, who is fighting IS with the peshmerga forces, told Al-Monitor that NATO should have a permanent base in Iraq, which would guarantee that “the IS experience would not be repeated.”

However, Hadi al-Ameri, the powerful leader of the Badr forces in the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, threatened in a statement Dec. 7 to attack any new US base in Iraq.

A fourth recommendation was that coalition forces need to be more involved in the advising process, not just at the sector division level but also at the brigade level, Schute said. An opinion submitted by retired Gen. David Petraeus on Sept. 22 to the US Congress, in his first testimony since resigning from the CIA, advocated a beefed-up military intervention in Syria and Iraq. Petraeus said that US adviser elements should be integrated “to the brigade headquarters level of those Iraqi forces fighting IS.”

Other military efforts include stepping up direct action by special operations against high-value targets similar to those recently in Hawija and in Syria, Schute added.

Special commandos would be used in assassination missions targeting IS leaders, rescuing hostages and intelligence gathering. These troops would also be engaging in raids that amount to combat operations.

The Rudaw Kurdish news site reported Dec. 26 that joint Kurdish and US commandos stormed an IS court in the town of Riyadh east of Hawija, where they captured and killed a number of militants, including Hussein Umair Assafi, a commander of the radical group.

A similar operation in Hawija in October freed 70 hostages from a prison. In May, a US commando led a special operation that targeted IS financier Abu Sayyaf, who was killed in the firefight in a raid at al-Omar, in Syria.

A final priority for Harsin is training and equipping bomb squads within the Iraqi and Kurdish forces that would support the advance of ground forces. IS has heavily booby-trapped cities it occupied, such as Tikrit and Ramadi, slowing the advance of Iraqi forces and rendering it a perilous exercise.

For Harsin, the "most dangerous kind" are bombs detonated by remote control, as IS militants wait in the vicinity for would-be victims. “They watch you and detonate the explosives once the bomb squad gets close. Creating and equipping anti-bombing squads with proper gear is thus a necessity,” Harsin said.

The fight against IS could be significantly improved and become more effective by adjusting the military approach, the experts believe. Introducing new measures could speed up the outcome, and possibly the settlement of the conflict.

(Source: Al Monitor)