Defense and foreign ministers attended a flurry of meetings in Washington this week focused on the next steps in the fight against ISIS (also known as ISIL or Daesh), as plans for the long-awaited recapture of Mosul and longer-term stabilization and reconstruction efforts for Iraq come into focus.
On Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter convened defense ministers and officials from more than 30 countries for an anti-ISIS coalition meeting at Joint Base Andrews to plan for the accelerated ISIS military campaign as Secretary of State John Kerry held a parallel meeting with foreign ministers at the State Department to raise new money for Iraq stabilization needs.
Both sides of the coalition effort joined together on Thursday for a joint summit, marking the first meeting held between counter-ISIS defense ministers and their diplomatic and civilian counterparts, Carter said.
“That’s important, because we know that defeating ISIL is more than a one-country or a one-military or a one-ministry job. We all have work to do, and we need to work together,” Carter said. “And this is a critically important time for our counter-ISIL campaign. … We now have the momentum in this fight and clear results on the ground.”
Of central focus at the meetings was preparing for the fight in the coming months to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and an ISIS stronghold, and planning for the aftermath of retaking the city.
“The liberation of Mosul is now in sight, and we must, as a coalition, get it right in supporting our Iraqi partners,” Brett McGurk, the president’s special envoy to the anti-ISIS coalition, said Thursday.
The planning on the non-military side for Mosul is focused on four areas, McGurk said: “First, we need a political agreement on the disposition of forces that will be used in the liberation; second, a unified plan on the humanitarian assistance; third, an agreed program for stabilization; and finally, an agreed plan for post-Daesh governance in Mosul.”
“We must apply every lesson learned, we must ensure that resources are available and ready, and we must act with urgency across all of our lines of effort. And let us remember, Mosul is where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his phony caliphate in June of 2014. And if we get this campaign right on the ground in all aspects, it is where we can begin to seal its fate,” he said.
As for the military side, the gathered defense ministers “reviewed and agreed on the next plays in our campaign,” Carter said Thursday, “which of course we’re not going to discuss publicly yet.”
“But let me be clear: They culminate in the collapse of ISIL’s control over the cities of Mosul and Raqqa (Syria),” he said.
It is important for the coalition to consider how that liberation happens, Michael O’Hanlon, co-director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on 21st Century Security and Intelligence, said, pointing to the question of how to deal with the ISIS fighters as a key concern. Authorities need to be “thinking about how many ISIS fighters we allow to escape from Mosul,” he said.
“These operations, historically, take two competing approaches — leave one side open and let people escape, which makes it easier to liberate the city and will be potentially less bloody, but ISIS lives to fight another day. Or, you lay siege to the whole city, medieval style, but the downside is a lot of other people, as well as your own forces, get killed,” O’Hanlon said.
A number of countries, including the U.S., France, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and Finland have recently made public commitments “to contribute even more to the military campaign,” Carter noted.
“It’s encouraging to see so many countries continue to be willing to do more. And there are others as well who will make their contributions public in due course,” he said.
It is “becoming very popular to say liberation will be easier than stabilization, and that’s probably true, but it’s important how the liberation happens,” according to O’Hanlon. To truly succeed, it must be a massive, well-planned effort that conveys a sense of high-level organization, he said, noting he is “quite concerned in the way in which the liberation campaign will be committed.”
The pledging conference for Iraq hosted by Kerry, meanwhile, raised more than $2.1 billion in new money for humanitarian aid, demining, and both immediate and longer-term stabilization efforts in the country. Kerry called the pledged money “real and immediate.”
“We made the point at this meeting that these contributions need to be real and they need to be happening as fast as possible,” he said at Wednesday’s press conference.
And it will be needed, Lise Grande, UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, told the gathering. The military campaign in Mosul could impact as many as 1.5 million people, she said.
“The Mosul humanitarian operation will be the largest, most complex in the world in 2016,” she said.
Perry Cammack, an associate in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Cipher Brief the pledging conference helps send a “positive political message” to the Iraqi political class and broader public that the “international community is serious.” The core challenge for Iraq remains a political one, as the country is riven by sectarian divides.
“There’s a real military challenge and counterterrorism challenge with ISIS in Iraq, but the tougher challenge in many ways is the political challenge,” Cammack, who was part of the policy planning staff of Kerry from 2013 to 2015, said. “There is a military campaign to root out ISIS, it’s slow going but it’s having success — but the U.S. and international ability to leverage the tools at our disposal in [Iraqi] politics are a lot more limited.”
But the more signals from the United States and the international community to emphasize commitment to Iraq and its future will likely help put pressure on Iraqi leaders to make necessary compromises and possibly negate some the influence from Iran, which “has benefited from this sense of international disengagement,” Cammack said.
Carter said the “biggest strategic concern” of the defense ministers “was that the stabilization and governance effort will lag behind the military campaign.”
“Making sure there's no such lag must be a significant strategic priority for us,” Carter said.
On Thursday, Kerry noted that progress is being made by the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, with recruitment slowed and defections increased. He estimated that the number of ISIS fighters has gone down by at least a third, and “today, we can look forward without exaggeration to a time when Daesh is driven completely out of Iraq and Syria.”
But “the day that happens will mark a critical turning point in the fight against” ISIS, he said, and the group will look to transform itself from a “phony state into some kind of global network whose only real purpose is to kill as many people as it can in as many places as possible.”
ISIS has claimed responsibility for a number of high-profile, violent attacks this year. In March, suicide bombers attacked a metro station and the airport in Brussels, and in June a shooter in Orlando, Florida killed 49 people after pledging allegiance to ISIS. This month, terrorist attacks have also struck Nice, France where 84 people were killed after being run over by a truck, and in Baghdad, Iraq, a bombing left more than 290 dead.
Given that ISIS is “not pursuing a passive strategy” in that regard, Kerry called on the coalition to increase information-sharing and work to break down bureaucratic barriers to speed up that exchange. The Secretary of State also said it was crucial for countries to creatively develop initiatives and “do all that we can as a global community to wage a holistic campaign against the root causes of violent extremism.”
“One of the things that strikes me is that ISIS presents two threats – there’s kind of ISIS as the quasi-state present in Syria and Iraq, and then there’s the global threat of ISIS as an ideological phenomenon,” Cammack said. “From the events in Syria and Iraq, we see that ISIS as state is relatively brittle and weak, but ISIS as kind of global pathology is actually pretty dangerous.”
