Military Victory in Mosul Likely to Lift P.M. Abadi’s Reelection Campaign

Posted: June 2nd, 2017

By Bilal Wahab

Bilal Wahab is a 2016-2017 Soref fellow at The Washington Institute, where he will focus on governance in the Iraqi Kurdish region and in Iraq as a whole. He has taught at the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani, where he established the Center for Development and Natural Resources, a research program on oil and development. He earned his Ph.D. from George Mason University; his M.A. from American University, where he was among the first Iraqis awarded a Fulbright scholarship; and his B.A. from Salahaddin University in Erbil. Along with numerous scholarly articles, he has written extensively in the Arabic and Kurdish media.

After almost eight months of fighting, the battle to liberate Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, from ISIS is nearing its end. The Iraqi army has taken over 90 percent of the city and, although resistance will be fierce in the last remaining pocket of ISIS resistance in the Old City, the fall of Mosul appears imminent. However, it is not yet clear what will happen after the city is liberated. The operation to oust ISIS from Mosul includes the Iraqi army, U.S.-led coalition forces, Kurdish Peshmerga – armed forces of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) – and Iranian-backed militias. The Cipher Brief’s Fritz Lodge spoke to Bilal Wahab, Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, about what comes after Mosul falls.

The Cipher Brief: Once ISIS is cleared from its last pockets in western Mosul, what will be the immediate effects on Mosul? What will we see in the weeks following?

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