The military preparation to liberate Mosul is moving at an accelerating pace with the expectation of a “mission accomplished” declaration before winter. Otherwise, it will have to wait until the spring, not only for military calculations, but more importantly for humanitarian reasons. The operation will cause a very large number of internally displaced people (IDP) to flood the already saturated and insufficiently managed IDP camps in the neighboring provinces. But the military phase is not the greatest challenge, given the gathering strength of Iraq’s security forces and the international support, from the United States of America and other allies. In this article, I will focus on a few non-military challenges from the aftermath of the imminent liberation.
There are three competing interests in Mosul that need to be reconciled to have a quiet post-liberation administration of the province. One interest is that of the Federal Iraqi Government that wants the city of Mosul, and the entirety of Nineveh Province, to come back to its 9 June 2014 administrative status. This will run against the ambitions of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that wants to unilaterally redraw the map, before the dust settles, and annex areas it claims to belong to the Kurdistan Region. The KRG already went on record stating that the Peshmerga will not withdraw from areas they liberated from the ISIS terrorists. The Kurds are aware of the political division in Baghdad that rendered the government too weak to curb Kurdish territorial ambitions. Indeed, the Kurds in national politics are main contributors to the federal weakness. But the Federal Government might end up being the least of KRG problems. If the KRG acts on its threat to unilaterally keep the liberated areas as part of Kurdistan, the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) will take matters in their own hands and fight the Peshmerga for every square inch of the captured territory. Unlike all other forces in Iraq, certain parts of the PMF do not pay attention to what Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi says, and they have less consideration for the American preferences. If a Peshmerga-PMU fight takes place, it will not be unprecedented. In November 2015, the two groups fought each other for ten days in Tuz Khurmatu and tensions remained commonplace in many other areas where their areas of operations overlap. That is why the KRG and its surrogates from Mosul reject the participation of the PMF in the Mosul liberation.
The second clash of interests will be between the Iraqi Federal Government and local politicians in Mosul. Since the fall of Mosul in the hands of ISIS, a variety of political loyalties emerged in the province, with some prominent Mosul politicians cheering the coming of ISIS and others using the loss of Mosul as a backdrop for their ongoing criticism of the Federal Government, claiming that the Sunnis were driven to seek protection from al-Qaeda and its offshoots. The Government accuses the political class in Mosul of conspiring with ISIS and facilitating the fall of their province. Former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, on whose watch Mosul was lost to ISIS, attributed the fall of Mosul to the commander of 3rd Division, a Kurd, saying he withdrew and disappeared leaving his division without a leader – and said the same was done in Salahuddin Province by the commander of the 4th Division, another Kurd, whose withdrawal caused the Speicher Massacre, where at least 1700 unarmed Shia cadets were executed by local tribes in Tikrit. Nuri al-Maliki also blamed the Mosul Chief of Police, saying he had a force of 40,000 police, but fired no bullet in defense of the city. He also accused of the leadership of KRG and the Governor of Mosul Atheel al-Nujafi of taking part in facilitating the fall of Mosul. Maliki’s accusation is just a little stronger than what can be inferred from the confession of Barham Salih, a prominent Kurdish leader, when ISIS decided to attack the Kurds. In a moment of “I told you so,” Salih stated: “I warned of the danger of the IS when they took over Mosul, but some people were excited about the changes.” The liberation of Mosul will be followed by a hard decision for the Iraqi Federal Government to make: what will be the role of those Mosul politicians – most of them were elected and still have local support – in the future governing of the city? Will they be tried for complicity in causing the catastrophic events in the past two years to prevent their future participation in destructive politics? Or will bygones be bygones? In the latter case, what will happen if the pro-ISIS politicians, and maybe ISIS members are elected to the Provincial Council in 2017 and to the Iraqi Parliament in 2018? Will this situation make ISIS officially a democratically-elected party in Iraq?
The third interest is that of Turkey. In late 2015, Turkey sent some troops into Iraq without the approval of the Iraqi Government and refused ever since to withdraw them despite multiple calls from the Iraqi side. This week, Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi reiterated his call on Turkey to withdraw its forces, stating that “the presence of Turkish forces hinders the efforts to eliminate ISIS; if Turkey is serious about fighting ISIS, it must withdraw its forces from Iraq.” Turkey’s interest in Mosul goes back to the early twentieth century, when the province was taken by the British after the WWI ceasefire agreement and included in the Iraqi territory. Certain local politicians in Mosul are close allies of Turkey, especially the former governor, Atheel al-Nujaifi. It will be very hard for the Iraqi Government to expel the NATO member from its territories and restore its sovereignty over the entire province against all the hostile attitudes from Turkey, the KRG and the local population who are still undecided about whom to resent more, ISIS or what they perceive as the “Shia-led government in Baghdad”.
And while we are discussing the popular sentiment, we would be remiss if we do not address the post-traumatic consequences of the ISIS occupation that lasted more than two years and will continue until the final liberation. Since its arrival in Mosul, ISIS has turned the city into a hatchery of terrorists. There is a generation of youth whose formative years were spent between the ISIS camps of militant training and the ISIS-run schools, whose textbooks are the worst tools of brainwashing and hate the world has encountered – a concentrate composition of takfiri theology from the works of Ibn Taymiyya to the contemporary Wahhabism and the related assortment of fanatical terrorist groups. Even adults, who are expected to be sickened by the scenes of beheadings and other cruel forms of corporal punishment are now commonly forming crowds around these outrageous practices with cellphones and ritualistically recording them for a later viewing. To assess and reverse the psychological damage in Mosul, the world needs to deploy an army of psychotherapists larger than the armed forces that will retake the city.
Abbas Kadhim is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University. Twitter: @DrAbbasKadhim.