Al Qaeda driven from Mosul

Sunday Times:

The hunt began just after dawn. Iraqi armoured personnel carriers surrounded the turbulent Zanjali district in the northern city of Mosul, blocking off roads as police acting on an urgent tip-off swept in and searched from house to house.

They were looking for an Al-Qaeda bomb – a big one. Their intelligence suggested it could be detonated as early as today.

As the search intensified, I accompanied Colonel Tawfeeq Abdullah on a tense drive through Mosul to check on the operation’s progress.

A gunner loomed out of the open hatch in the roof of our Iraqi army Humvee, swivelling a heavy machinegun and scouring the bullet-pocked streets for enemy.

A soldier in the front passenger seat scanned the roads for improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the roadside bombs that have wreaked havoc on Iraqis and American forces.

Only three days earlier a roadside bomb had blown up an Iraqi Humvee, killing a policeman.

Everyone in our vehicle knew it was a prime target for Al-Qaeda in Iraq, formerly an awesome force that struck fear into the hearts of cities across the west and centre of Iraq but now reduced to a rump in the north in one of the most sweeping victories of America’s war on terror.

“We are going to a very bad neighbourhood,” said Abdullah, wiping the sweat from his face. It was 41C outside and far hotter inside the armoured vehicle.

Yet despite Zanjali’s reputation as a hotbed of the insurgency, we were able to climb down from the vehicle and walk safely along a road covered in hard-packed dirt from a spate of recent sandstorms.

...

As the police continued their search for weapons, insurgents and, above all, explosives, a few shopkeepers and residents stood idly watching.

Ambulances were positioned every few hundred yards along the road in case of fighting. It never materialised. A search of hundreds of houses met no resistance and yielded no bomb, just 60kg of TNT and some bomb-making equipment.

All that the soldiers found otherwise was a solitary Kalashnikov assault rifle.

“We let him keep the gun because every Iraqi family is allowed to have a personal weapon,” said Major Awad al-Juburi, 39, standing in the road in full battle gear. “The families have been okay with us so far. They are not objecting. They offered us tea and water.”

In Mosul, Al-Qaeda’s last redoubt, the group still held sway as recently as Easter. Now it lacks the strength to fight the army face to face and has lost the sympathy of most of the ordinary citizens who once admired its stand against the occupying forces and their allies in the Iraqi army.

...

Brigadier-General Abdullah Abdul, a senior Iraqi commander, said: “Al-Qaeda in Mosul is pretty much not able to do the attacks that they could do previously. They are doing small attacks and trying to do big ones but they are mostly not succeeding.”

The Iraqis and Americans have got Al-Qaeda on the run. How have they come so far, so fast?...

...

It quickly became clear that the Iraqi army and the Americans’ 3rd Armoured Cavalry Regiment were combining their forces effectively. American tanks formed cordons while Iraqi soldiers went from house to house.

An outer cordon was established to ring the city with a huge bank to keep out bombers and the small number of fighters still arriving in Iraq from Syria to reinforce Al-Qaeda.

Meanwhile, an inner cordon of security checkpoints was set up within the city, cutting off districts from one another to curtail insurgents’ movements.

The Americans built small forts known as command operating posts in areas where control was established to increase the flow of intelligence and ensure that no ground was ceded. The impact of the operation was instant.

In the week before it began there were 195 acts of violence, including roadside bombings, sniper shootings and mortar and grenade attacks. The following week, when the entire city was placed under a 24-hour curfew, this figure fell to 93.

...

In the past week, as the weapons finds slowed to a trickle and the attacks declined to just 13, Americans and Iraqis alike were elated but not complacent. A car bomb that killed 18 people and wounded 80 in Mosul 10 days ago served as a reminder that the enemy has yet to be eliminated.

Nevertheless, the speed of Al-Qaeda’s decline in Iraq – not only in the north but throughout the country – has taken many military strategists and observers by surprise.

...

There is much more.

The article is something of a text on running a counterinsurgency operation. It is too bad Obama will never read it. It proves how wrong he has been about counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and how wrong he has been about the facts on the ground. He is completely unhinged from the facts that don't coincide with his desperation for defeat.