Battle for Mosul commentary: A key melting pot at heart of nation’s crisis

Smoke rises from clashes in the east of Mosul
Reuters
Robert Fox17 October 2016

This battle is the most important test for Haider al Abadi’s regime in Baghdad and Iraq’s military to date. In June 2014, Mosul was seized by Islamic State as government forces crumbled and fled.

The country’s prime minister has promised “only Iraqi troops” will enter the northern city once it is captured. “We will bring life back to Mosul after two years of darkness” Mr Abadi said, announcing the offensive on television.

Holding on to Mosul, by far the biggest city seized by IS, could prove a major problem. Like Kirkuk, Mosul is strategically important — not least because of its oilfields — and ethnically mixed.

This has been a source of contention and violence here almost since Iraq was established 96 years ago.

Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen and others have all pressed claims for their bit of the region.

The Arabs themselves are divided — and the presence of too many Shia fighters in the Popular Mobilisation Units fighting to reclaim the city could spell trouble.

These elements were hugely resented by local Sunnis in the recapture of Tikrit, some 140 miles south-east.

Mr Abadi’s Shia-led government must do more to enfranchise the Sunnis of central Iraq, who have felt marginalised since the Anglo-American invasion of 2003.

The Iraqi authorities must also do all they can to help the civilians still trapped in Mosul.

IS thugs have threatened to kill them if they try to escape. The employment of allied air power, including RAF planes and munitions, will have to be extremely judicious.

Even if IS is driven out of the city, and pushed further back in neighbouring Syria, it will fight another day, elsewhere and in different forms.

But today the focus is rightly on Mosul and Aleppo — the twin hubs of what is the defining crisis of the Arab world.

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