Mosul operation: The comic framework

What follows is a summary of the last part of an essay by Ali Al-Hamdani published on the Sunni-resistance website albasrah.net, in which he provides a step-by-step guide for those of us who are still scratching our heads trying to figure out what the whole Mosul operation was supposed to be about in the first place. I haven't picked this because it is the best overall account, or because it is the most convincing overall account. I have picked it because it is the only overall account (that I have seen). In particular, the writer tries to answer the question what was the primary purpose(s) of the Mosul operation, and what was merely embarrassing fallout (thus perhaps helping put the stories told in the previous two posts into better perspective).

In a nutshell, he concludes first of all that we can't assume there is any truth to the idea of "wiping out the last bastion of AlQaeda in Iraq", given that against an enemy like AQ the first element is surprise, and in this case they were given over six-months advance warning. We're talking about professional military people, after all. So that hypothesis is out. In fact, he writes

There remains only one possible reasonable justification for all of that [media] storm, and it is that it was an attempt to draw the Iraqi resistance from a variety of places in Iraq, to draw them out and to cram them together in the area of Mosul, and that throughout all of those months preceding the start of the operations, convinced that would happen, and that the resistance, including those already present in Ninawa province, would come together in defense and to confront the Iraqi forces and the American forces allied with them, and enter into an organized war with them, repeating for a second time the experience of Falluja. This time they would suffer a decisive blow, and they would be completely crippled!

But it didn't happen, and the leaders of the resistance didn't fall into the trap, because the game was apparent. And so it was that Falluja again offered its lessons to Mosul and to other regions throughout occupied Iraq.

Just to make the rest of his account crystal clear, his point is that what followed was more along the lines of trying to over up the embarrassment of having declared a decisive battle without an enemy, than any expression of actual strategic aims. He continues:

When the American and the Iraqi armies entered Mosul, and with them the Peshmerga forces within the city, there was not a single shot fired! And what happened then to cover this scandalous situation? They arrested former Baath officers on the pretext of conducting investigations, and government sources said they arrested up to 1500 people! And they wanted to show some kind of victory so they talked about saboteurs and gangs and so on, and all those expressions that Iraqis have grown so fed-up with.

And then Maliki came to Mosul, with his Ministers of Defence and the Interior, and his national security adviser and others from the "leadership". And the only thing he could do was to utter that miserable explanation where he announced that he, after examining the situation, regretted that Mosul had been left for five years under the control of the Peshmerga... What we don't understand is what is the role of the Prime Minister of Iraq if it is not to have a grasp of what is going on in one of the provinces of Iraq. And after that we heard news of [Maliki's] meeting with local tribal leaders and recruiting 11,000 of their members into the army--and the flight of Khosro Goran to Irbil--and Maliki's communications with Barzani--and suspending Dureid Kashmula the governor of Mosul--and the firing of Mataa Al-Khazraji, commander of the Second [Iraqi Army] division in Mosul, and subjecting him to investigation...

And then--Maliki returned to Baghdad!!!

And now, says Ali Al-Hamdani, the Americans are starting to build a dirt wall around Mosul, cutting off the three roads to the outside world, one to the Syrian border, the other to Baghdad and the third to Irbil. He mockingly compares this to the Maginot line, and to the Barlif (Bar Lev; thank you Helena) Line in the Sinai in 1967, and to sum up he says they are calling this the Riyadh project, after the first name of the Iraqi army officer who led the Mosul operation. You an see pictures of it on the website of Stars and Stripes, he says.

His final point is that bottling up the resistance and destroying it was only the first part of the Maliki/US strategy. The second part was to allow the Kurds to exploit the situation of war and chaos to implement their plans for control of Mosul and the entire Ninawa region, for incorporation into the Kurdish region.