12/20/16 – Daniel Davis on the indecisive battle for Mosul – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him, the host of it, Scott Horton.
Introducing Lieutenant Colonel, retired, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L. Davis, Danny Davis.
He writes at, well, mostly for the national interest at nationalinterest.org, but also some other places, including he wrote at least one, I think, so far for the Libertarian Institute, so you can find him there.
This one is called Is the Battle for Mosul Doomed?
And you might remember at least, what was it, back in August you were in Erbil in Kurdistan reporting on the war, right?
Yep, that's correct.
All right, so obviously you've been watching closely here.
I can tell by what I read about the detail of your analysis of the war.
So the battle for Mosul, I guess I should say.
So here it's, what, the second biggest city in Iraq.
It's up there in the northwest.
It's been under the control of Islamic State since June of 2014.
And now the battle is on.
I guess, can you first of all tell us who all is in on the attack against the Islamic State in Mosul now?
Yeah, the plan so far has been to isolate, initially to isolate ISIS within Mosul.
So they started kind of slowly stripping away all the external, the smaller little villages and subdivisions around the city proper.
And so you had, of course, the Peshmerga.
You had the Iraqi security forces, the ISF proper.
You also had some Sunni militia that were involved with that.
There was some Shia militia, but they have not been involved with the actual assault into the city thus far.
They've been sort of like an external blocking force, if you will.
And so they've been on the outside, but they've been preventing ISIS from escaping or so.
So that's been the forces that are basically arrayed against it.
And, of course, along with all those ground forces, you have coalition slash United States Air Forces providing surveillance, drone strikes, air strikes proper, as well as command and control and, I'm sorry, intelligence.
Let me ask you this.
The Iraqi army, is that not just the Bata Brigade anyway?
Or that was just a long time ago, but now it's really separate and distinct from the Shiite militias?
Well, I think that in fact from what I've been hearing here just in the last couple of days is that there's not a lot of unity going on in it.
There's a lot of stovepiping going on.
I mean you have Bata Brigade.
You have other Shiite militia.
You do have the actual Iraqi security forces, their main armed forces.
And then you've also got the Iraqi special forces.
I think it's called the Golden Lion Brigade or something like that, which at least so far everybody I've heard from is providing some actually effective fighting.
But it's only that group, the special forces, which have been doing anything really effective.
And most of the standard military forces have done very little except for absorb quite a bit of casualties.
And now what about the Iranian Quds Force and General Soleimani?
Yeah, they're the ones that they kind of went to the far west of Mosul.
They've kind of sealed off the area around there, and they're actually moving more towards Tal Afar to try to make some progress over there because there's still a lot of competition.
There's a lot of anxiety and whatever about them trying to participate specifically in going into Mosul.
So for the moment, they're not trying to get in, but they are trying to scratch out area around Tal Afar.
And then, of course, recent reporting has indicated that their intent is to drive ISIS out of the Tal Afar area, reestablish control there, and then turn up into Syria.
So we'll see how that works out.
Yeah.
All right.
And now there were reports just as the battle was starting that, I guess, before the Shiite militias or the Iranians were able to seal off the western escape routes, that some number of Islamic State fighters had fled and made it to Raqqa.
And I guess the Russians said, I don't know what number, a thousand.
But then there was also Rudow, the Kurdish news service, reported that, I guess, about 3,500 Islamic State fighters had made it to Raqqa.
Do you think that that's true, or do you know any other corroborating information?
And then what percentage of Islamic State's actual force in Mosul does that represent, do you think?
Of course.
I mean, who can say for sure what is true and what isn't?
I personally find that I'm skeptical of that because there was at least initially some reporting from basically some, I guess, spies, if you want to call them that, within Mosul that were reporting on what was going on in there, even from the heart of Mosul I'm talking about.
Before any of the Iraqi or coalition forces made it even close to that part of the city.
And by all evidence, they had decided, ISIS leadership had decided that they're going to make this a die in place kind of a thing for the organization itself.
And probably they're going to get some leaders out because they don't want the organization's top people to perish in there so that the group itself dies.
But it looks like that they are saying, no, we're going to stay here and we're going to die in place.
And so they have prepared elaborate defenses over many months.
In fact, even partially over the two years that they've been there, more than two years now.
And so when you look at how the fighting has gone so far, the evidence supports that contention that they're not getting guys out of there.
They're not even wanting to.
They want to extract as high of casualties and difficulties as they can on the attacking force.
And my personal estimation and analysis is that their intent is to hold out for as long as possible to inflict the greatest number of casualties they can on the attackers to sap their will to fight.
And the longer that they can hold out, the greater becomes the chances of they're becoming splits with the Iraqi security forces, with the Peshmerga, with the Quds forces folks you were talking about a second ago.
Maybe they get impatient.
Maybe they don't want to play nice anymore.
Maybe they think they can do better or whatever.
I mean, you know, that's an unholy alliance as it is, all those groups fighting together, because otherwise many times they're fighting against each other.
If this thing drags on too far, then ISIS has a chance to win, not because they can defeat the forces, but if they can sap their will to fight, then they can maybe even get more people to go elsewhere.
Maybe to go to Iraq and maybe to join some of these other places in Libya or in Somalia or elsewhere as the brand itself.
If it can stand up to all this coalition, to the U.S. air power, to all these things and yet still maintain some kind of viability, then they have a chance to continue their march to relevance if they want to.
I don't know that there's not any long-term hope in that, just because they have such a perverted ideology it just can't be sustained.
But they can damn sure drag this out and cause a lot of bloodshed.
Well, you know, I don't know, man.
I'm not a soldier, but it seems like American JSOC and SOCOM and USAF and all these other guys acting as their auxiliary troops, they can't march right in and take this city from a couple of Zarqawi's men or even a couple of 10,000 of Zarqawi's men.
It sounds kind of crazy.
Well, you could – I mean if somebody made the decision that, all right, we're going to take this city no matter what, I mean you could do it, but then you've got something like Aleppo where it's going to completely destroy the place or even Stalingrad for that matter.
And there's still – one of the big ploys that ISIS has – one of the big tools that they've used is they've prevented many of the residents from leaving.
So if we did do something like that and go in heavy-handed, we would cause probably tens of thousands of casualties.
And then, of course, in the world public opinion, we would all be branded as the bad guys, and we know that.
And so they're being very careful about that.
I've actually heard – read reports just this last few days where some of the Iraqi commanders were concerned because they kind of feel like their hands are tied, but they don't have any alternative to just killing large numbers of their people, which apparently the Russians and the Syrians kind of got over in Aleppo.
And they said, oh, well, whoever dies, dies.
We're going to bomb everybody.
Why don't they say, hey, we're pausing to open a humanitarian corridor for civilians to flee for a while.
I mean I'm not saying because I prefer a blitz, but I'm saying it seems kind of strange.
They told all the people in the town to stay, and then – so now they have to fight this kind of long-term battle just for one city.
Well, and see – and that happened.
That actually – that change occurred while I was there in August, and it took a lot of the UN relief workers by surprise because the plan had always been – I mean since January, this past January, had been to we're going to do exactly that.
We're going to open corridors.
We're going to establish camps for 700,000, 800,000 people so when they come out, they'll have someplace to go and all that kind of thing.
And then literally I think three weeks before this thing kicked off, suddenly the Baghdad government changed its mind and said now that we're going to – we put all these tens of thousands of leaflets throughout the city telling everybody don't come out, stay there.
And it was a disaster from the beginning.
I mean even before it happened because it's just common sense.
If you're sending in and you know these guys have dug in, you know they have elaborate defenses and IED factories and all the things that we've now confirmed that they had, and you tell the people to stay there, you know this is not going to be a fast deal.
So what are they going to eat?
What are they going to drink?
And what are they going to do when they get caught in all this crossfire, which is exactly what's happened?
And so how can anyone be surprised by this and now it's happening?
And so what are they going to do now?
I don't know because they've kind of made their bed and now they have to lie in it.
Yeah.
Well, was there some kind of at least pseudo-smart guy thinking behind this that you know of?
I mean somebody had a reason.
Was it just because they thought, well, hell, where are we going to build a tent city for these people instead?
So we might as well just leave them where they are?
That's what I think is that they said, well, number one is that the UN had put out many months before this, they said here's the requirements.
Here's what it's going to take for us to do this.
We need this number of dollars and we need to buy this number of equipment and gear and tents and cooking facilities, all that kind of stuff to take care of these people.
Here's the monthly logistics footprint that that will require, and we need you guys to give us this before you launch.
In fact, we need it at least six weeks prior to the launch start so that we have a chance to do it.
And they didn't get like a tenth, literally a tenth of what the UN had said that they need as a minimum to start.
And my personal opinion is that the Baghdad leader said, well, damn, we're not going to be able to get that.
We can't figure it out this time.
So, hey, let's just tell them to stay there and figure it out for themselves, not even worrying about what the consequences would be.
That's what I think happened.
All right.
And then you alluded to this earlier, I think, a bit, this UN report that 3,000-something Iraqi army guys had died just in the last month in this battle.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was – I believe it was 2,000 deaths in November alone, and I forget the number of wounded, but it was probably – Oh, it was total casualties, not the – I said 3,000.
I got that one.
2,000 was death alone, so there's – who knows how many were actually wounded on top of that.
Oh, OK.
So it's a pretty good – I mean, it's a huge number.
Yeah.
Does that sound right to you, 2,000 dead fighting ISIS?
I mean, how many ISIS fighters do you guess are in the city?
I know you can only guess.
I'm not trying to nail you down on a real number.
What seems to me to be the best – the most credible estimate that I've heard is the one that was told to me by one of the Peshmerga generals when I was there.
He said he believed that there were about 10,000 fighters in there.
Now, at the time, U.S. people were saying, no, we think there's like 3,400 to 5,000, something like that.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
You claim in the body count that you always give that almost half that many have already been killed, and yet you haven't even gotten into the hard part of the fight yet.
So I think it was probably closer to 10,000.
And then from some of the reports that were coming out from in Mosul, it appeared that ISIS was basically press-ganging teenagers and even some boys into fighting for them, so they didn't have a choice.
So they may actually have more people who are unwilling but press-ganged into it, so they may even have more than that.
But from what they've suffered already, it had to be certainly a lot more than 5,000 because otherwise they would have already collapsed.
Well, you know, back when the campaign was still on, Hillary made this kind of gaffe, or I guess gaffe isn't the right term, but maybe it was.
But everybody kind of glommed on to the wrong part of it because she more or less said that Mosul was on the border between Syria and Iraq, when in fact it's, what, I don't know, 200 or 300 miles or whatever it is, something from the border there.
But still the point was still the same, that she was saying that, yeah, what we're going to do is we're going to march on into Mosul, we're going to knock them out of there, and then we're going to basically chase them.
We're going to keep on going and keep pushing west until we got them all cornered and bottled up in Syria.
And the thing that was interesting about it to me was the reaction to that was, no, we don't want to do that.
Why would she say that?
That would be some crazy, terrible, wrong thing to do.
But they couldn't really explain why, and I think it was because the answer was something they didn't want to really say out loud in English definitively was we don't want to defeat the Islamic State in Syria as long as there's still a problem for Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government in Damascus, even now at the end of 2016.
Yeah, that's just part of the convoluted thing.
As a matter of fact, I have just recently talked with an American photographer who just got back from Raqqa, as a matter of fact, Joey Lawrence from New York, who has seen some just remarkable things.
And one of the things that he told me from some of his recent travels, which also, by the way, included the regime leaders in Damascus, which I just found utterly fascinating, was that there is so many backstabbing and agreements with his and the enemy of my enemy today is my friend, but tomorrow he'll be my enemy again.
And so it's – you can't even tell the players with a roster because they change every other day, and they change uniforms and whatever.
I don't even know who the good guys are anymore, who the bad guys are, if there ever really were any distinguishing features like that.
But right now, I don't know that anyone really knows what needs to happen for anyone to, quote, win.
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Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
So now back to your real point here, which is you talk about – let me get the quote right there – slowly collapsing an extended security zone.
In other words, they have – the Islamic State has territory in Mosul that they're hanging on to, and yet it keeps getting smaller and smaller basically in concentric circles inward until they're completely surrounded and blasted with the last J-Dam or whatever it is in their last stand as that's going on.
But you're saying that they're actually doing well enough and holding their own well enough that they're creating a time problem for the attackers, that they're dragging this out long enough that it's becoming a situation where possibly the coalition attacking them won't be able to hold it together or maybe even worse will turn on each other before they're done defeating the Islamic State there.
Exactly, and I mean that's what I thought the most likely scenario was when I was there, and so far that's exactly what's playing out.
And I always remember the answer I got when I was talking to that Peshmerga general when I was there, and I said, does this have the possibility of devolving into an Aleppo-style years kind of in the making fight?
And he says absolutely.
I mean he didn't even hesitate.
He said absolutely it does.
He goes, if everything goes right, if everything – the best-case scenario happens, then yeah, we could literally drive them out within three to four months.
We're two-and-a-half months into that already, and they haven't – they barely even cracked the inside of the city.
But he said yeah, and if it doesn't, he said then yeah, this could collapse because he said I don't think the Iraqi security forces, though they've made good progress since 2014 when they disintegrated, he said they're still not up to the task.
They still can't take this by themselves, and that's exactly the way it's playing out.
That's why you see that the special forces units, the Iraqi special forces units have been successful, but they've also taken a whole lot of casualties.
But the other – just the regular fighters are also taking casualties but not making that much progress, and I don't think they can sustain this level of casualties.
And then they're going to have to either halt it or I don't know that the troops, the Iraqi troops are going to continue pressing it if they see that all they're doing is getting blown up every day.
Yeah.
Well, that's the big question.
And then what comes next?
Here comes Donald Trump with General Mattis, the Marine Corps general as a secretary of defense, and Mike Flynn who was McChrystal's right-hand man targeting people in the surge for the war against proto-ISIS, al-Qaeda in Iraq at the time back in 2006 and 2007.
And so, I mean, I guess my worst fear is they're going to march the Marines right in there just like 2003 only – I mean, not in the whole damn country down in the Shiite South, but into Mosul.
They're going to drop in the paratroopers.
They're going to do whatever it takes to sack that city and occupy it and bring the fight to ISIS in a hardcore way if only for domestic political reasons to show that Obama days are over and now we got the Marines and now we're not going to let ISIS exist as a place, the Islamic State, for one more day here.
And turn it back into a militia and you'll never get rid of that, the terrorist group and the militia.
But at least – and I'm just thinking, of course – and you know what, that might solve the problem of Shiite sectarianism in Mosul if the Marine Corps kicked all the Shiites out and said go back to Baghdad, we'll handle this.
But then that raises the huge question of who comes next and what comes next and whether you're going to let – basically go with the Joe Biden plan and go ahead and split the country up at this point or what are you going to do at that point?
Because how are they supposed to get Baghdad rule to extend to Mosul when it didn't in the first place?
That's how they lost it to the Islamic State in 2014.
So yeah, no, that was a question.
Exactly.
Well, you got it pegged.
I mean they didn't before.
They're not going to afterwards.
So the absolute worst possible solution you could possibly make is to go in heavy with U.S. troops because it would be nothing but sheer disaster because then you would have a situation worse than you have now because you're entering into a civil war.
And that can't end well, and it's not our fight to – we can't say, all right.
We're going to go in and drive these guys out.
For what end?
I think that the American public, even if he decided to try to do it for domestic purposes, I think that would be a massive backfire.
But I think he's aware of that because the American public is flat-out sick and tired of fighting over there, and they're not ready to sacrifice any more American lives, especially not in a conventional engagement.
The one thing that does give me a little bit of concern is that if Flynn, being the experience that he had with McChrystal and all that and the spec ops stuff that he's – as part of his forte, is that he wants to try to increase that kind of stuff.
But even that's not going to succeed.
We cannot impose.
Here's the bottom line, Scott.
The United States cannot, cannot – not shouldn't – cannot impose a military solution to this fight by the use of American military power, flat out.
We cannot do it.
All we can do is make it worse.
Yeah.
So are you concerned that Mattis's advice might be something like that but starting out with we can kick their ass.
We can drive – the Marine Corps can certainly drive them out of Mosul and then leave.
But make sure that the Iraqi army or the Pesh or somebody is there to make sure that nobody reestablishes the Islamic State.
But yeah, you're right.
We don't want to redo 2005, but let's just do this one real quick thing.
Well, let's see if it's not going to be real quick because they had two years to prepare this place, and that's one of the reasons it's been so slow is because they have this extraordinary – I don't know if you saw it three, maybe four days ago.
I can't remember which organization came out with the report, but they said they have discovered extensive and elaborate and sophisticated weapons creation in areas where they have driven some of the ISIS out.
I mean they have incredible amounts of firepower stock piled up in there.
I mean these guys are dug in like ticks, and you could even send in the best of the U.S. Marine Corps and army and ground fighters or whatever, and it would be incredibly expensive in terms of manpower and blood and time to go in and get them out because they're dug in.
And it doesn't matter who they are.
If they're dug in and they have tunnels underneath and they have interlocking fire and they have the 200 – or the hundreds rather of suicide car bombs and the crisscrossing snopper positions that they have peppered throughout there, I mean it's going to exact a toll on anybody, and there's no way America should pay that price because they won't succeed anyway.
Yeah.
All right, well, so what if I had my way and I just said that's it.
Air Force and everybody else out.
I don't even want to lose one more drone to this fight.
Forget it.
We're done.
Then what would happen do you think?
Well, I'm not sure there'd be a whole lot of difference in what is going to happen already because so far all we're doing is the air power and stuff.
There's some people who advocate exactly that because they say, well, military, it can't be succeeded, so why continue to risk American lives and lose some in a fight that can't be won?
And it's a tough one because we've gotten ourselves into this situation, and we keep going back in fits and starts and pieces here, and now they're in the middle of a big fight, which I don't think they should have ever started, but they did.
But at some point you've got to say, fellas, this is your country, and if the people who have the most to lose from this is Saudi Arabia and some of these other places where these terrorists can go, and there's a case to be made that says, you know what?
This is your backyard, fellas.
If y'all are as concerned about it as that, then maybe you need to be providing some of the stuff and working with Baghdad to try to bring this to an end, but we're not going to be able to do it, so we need to do something different.
That ain't going to happen because the Saudis created the Islamic State to fight against Shiite-controlled Baghdad, and that's what – the Islamic State is their answer to the Dawah party.
That was what their foreign minister told John Kerry, in fact.
That's the exact quote.
Did you hear?
It's been a week now, but Secretary of Defense Ash Carter went to Saudi Arabia.
I believe that was actually in Saudi Arabia, and he complained about these countries in the region who have the most to lose are not doing anything to help, and they better start doing this stuff.
Well, and then on the tour, he announces an increase of another 200 American special forces.
So just put yourself in the position of these countries who do have stuff to – or are threatened.
If we keep paying the price, if we keep sending our troops to do it, why should they?
If we're going to come over there and do their work for them, then they're not going to.
But if you tell them, all right, you know what?
We're not going to.
We'll provide diplomatic and humanitarian aid, and we'll help in intelligence if we can, but, boys, you're going to have to provide the boots and the airplanes in your backyard if you want to keep them out of your yard.
Right.
Yeah, that's the thing.
They would have to make a whole different set of calculations about how many different armies of terrorist shock troops they create in North Africa and the Middle East when actually – I mean, I think I even read – well, I mean, I certainly read the announcement of the plan, but I think I even read a follow-up to this.
So they actually were trying to build a Trumpian Great Wall on the Saudi-Iraqi border because they're that terrified of these guys coming back where they're from.
Yeah.
I hadn't heard that, but it doesn't surprise me.
Yeah.
Well, I admit that's just a trace of a little something I thought I read, but anyway.
They better look out, though.
I mean, chickens coming home to roost and all that kind of thing.
Exactly.
One thing I know for a fact I read was a Saudi minister complaining that we have Saudi volunteers, our young boys, fighting for ISIS and al-Nusra, killing each other in battle.
What's going on here?
We're doing it all wrong.
We should all be fighting against Assad together or whatever.
I kind of think so.
I don't know the total numbers.
I don't know if anybody counted the total numbers of Saudi, quote, volunteers who've gone to fight in Syria, but it's more than a couple.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sure of that.
All right.
Well, listen, I've kept you too long, but thanks very much.
I appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, y'all.
That is former, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis, and I should have said at the beginning he is famously a whistleblower on the Afghan war back in 2012.
And he writes now mostly at The National Interest, and this one is called Is the Battle for Mosul Doomed?
We ran it the other day on AntiWar.com.
In fact, I think we're running it today on the Institute page at LibertarianInstitute.org as well.
Yeah, it is.
It's still there.
So check that out.
And thanks, y'all.
Stop by ScottHorton.org for all the archives.
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