Al Qaeda remnants in Mosul area
Sunni insurgents pushed out of Baghdad and Anbar Provinces have migrated to this northern Iraqi city and have been trying to turn it into a major hub for their operations, according to American commanders.The story does not say why there are no "concerned citizen" check points in Mosul. That additional force on the streets would make it difficult for al Qaeda to maneuver to contact. COIN operations still need a force to space ratio that is adequate stop enemy movement and flood the zone when he is found. While the story mentions moving some Iraqi troops back to the area, we should also consider moving troops from areas where al Qaeda has been defeated. We must make sure they find no sanctuary in Iraq.A growing number of insurgents have relocated here and other places in northern Iraq as the additional forces sent by President Bush have mounted operations in the Iraqi capital and American commanders have made common cause with Sunni tribes in the western part of the country.
The insurgents who have ventured north include Abu Ayyub-al Masri, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi group that American intelligence says has foreign leadership. American officials say the insurgent leader has twice slipped in and out of Mosul in Nineveh Province to try to rally fellow militants and put end to infighting.
“We have seen some migration of Al Qaeda,” said Col. Stephen Twitty, the commander of the Fourth Brigade Combat Team, First Cavalry Division, which is returning to the United States after 13 months here. “What has driven that are the operations down south.”
The Americans and Iraqis have responded to the influx of militants with operations to cut off the insurgents’ financing and by pursuing insurgent leaders, including Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia’s emir for the eastern side of the city who was killed in a raid late last month.
American and Iraqi units have been able to hold off the insurgents and disrupt their planning. But they have not been able to decrease the rate of attacks in Mosul, which has held stubbornly steady over the past year even as attacks have fallen in Baghdad and Anbar Province, according to an analysis by American officers.
That has prompted American and Iraqi commanders to propose the return of two Iraqi battalions that were sent from western Mosul earlier this year to bolster Iraqi forces in Baghdad. Such a move would increase the Iraqi troop strength here by 1,400 troops or more, according to estimates by American officers, and enable the Iraqis to establish more outposts in some of the more violent areas of the city.
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“Mosul continues to be a center of gravity for the insurgency,” Colonel Welsh said. “It is a financial hub.”
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To counter the insurgents, American commanders had sought to establish tighter control over the oil shipments from the Baiji refinery and to detain officials and financiers in the illicit transactions. American and Iraqi forces have also conducted a series of raids against the insurgent leadership, killing or detaining six local emirs.
As a result of such efforts, the militants’ have not been able to carry out large-scale coordinated attacks, American officials say. Instead, they have been going after easier targets, like Iraqi police checkpoints, that are less well armed and protected than the Iraqi Army or the Americans.
“In the past, the enemy was able to mass their forces on particular targets at a particular time,” said Capt. Scott Linker, an intelligence officer. “We are not seeing those types of attacks anymore.”
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