Why Iraq Asked Thousands of Civilians Not to Flee a City’s Destruction by James Verini - New York Times

In a film, on the news, you watch a war. While in a war, you mostly hear it. Weapons are fired day and night, but only sometimes do you see them fired. As much as images, then, each battle takes on its own sounds.

The battle of Mosul began officially on Oct. 17, 2016. Sonically, it didn’t come into its own until some weeks later. In the opening skirmishes, as Iraqi troops encountered Islamic State fighters on farmland and in villages outside the city, rounds whistled unobstructed through the air and thudded in the sod, a vague overture. When the troops breached the easternmost districts of the city proper — in early November — then you could begin to really listen to the conflict...

So ISIS, in its efforts to hold Mosul — or, really, to kill as many people and destroy as much of the city as it could while losing it, as the jihadists knew they inevitably must — relied on tactics known in Western military parlance as “harassing fire.” It was a phrase that amused Iraqi soldiers whose English was sufficient to understand its insufficiency and who had to actually endure this harassment. ISIS’s harassers included world-class snipers, crack mortar teams, the suicidal drivers of vehicle-­borne improvised explosive devices, or V.B.I.E.D.s — mobile car bombs — and, to direct these efforts, something new to warfare, a fleet of commercial-­market drones. ISIS managed to smuggle untold numbers of the small, cheap machines, the kind of thing you can buy on Amazon, into Mosul…

… The Iraqi special forces had been fighting ISIS for more than two years. They had fought them near Baghdad, in Ramadi, then Falluja, Tikrit and Baiji, pushing the jihadists north nearly 250 miles to Mosul, the caliphate’s greatest urban stronghold. Many of Karim’s comrades had fought Al Qaeda and ISIS’s other precursors before that. The tip of the spear into Mosul, the special forces had been going without a break for weeks now, taking heavy casualties. Karim had been wounded five times since Ramadi. In Falluja, a rocket skivered a Humvee in which he was the gunner. It was the scar from that attack that he wanted to show me, a discolored sunken patch below his rib cage. Looking down at it, he said, “It was a big hole before.” …

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The Best Thing America Built In Iraq: Iraq’s Counter-Terrorism Service and the Long War Against Militancy by Michael Knights and Alex Mello - War on the Rocks

When the last pocket of the self-styled Islamic State (ISIL) was eradicated in west Mosul last week, it was fitting that the 36^th Commando Battalion struck the final blows. The 36^th was the first Iraqi special forces unit to be developed after Saddam’s fall. Today it is the longest serving component of the Counter-Terrorism Service — a force of less than 8,000 elite troops built by the United States, and the most militarily and politically reliable force at the disposal of the Iraqi government.

The Iraqi Army and Federal Police have regained some public trust since their collapse in June 2014, when Mosul and around twenty other cities fell to ISIL, but only two forces in Iraq have retained the faith of the Iraqi people throughout the war. One is the Counter-Terrorism Service, known in Iraq as the “Golden Division,” a model for multi-ethnic and cross-sectarian nationalism. The other is the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), the volunteer units raised by a religious fatwa and government orders in June 2014, which has fallen under the leadership of an Iranian-backed U.S.-designated terrorist, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis.

The evolution of these two forces will likely shape the future of Iraq itself. Baghdad will need effective counter-terrorism forces backed by the most advanced intelligence capabilities available to the U.S.-led coalition if it is to pursue ISIL into Iraq’s deserts, borderlands, mountains, jungle groves, and urban hideouts. As important, the Iraqi government requires loyalist forces that are under the full command and control of the Iraqi prime minister — particularly as PMF leaders such as Muhandis and Hadi al-Ameri (head of the largest PMF faction Badr) continue to act outside prime ministerial control.

In the aftermath of Mosul, the Counter-Terrorism Service is exhausted. Being the best has taken its toll: The U.S. government assesses that the Counter-Terrorism Service suffered “forty percent battle losses” in Mosul. In this piece, we look at the lessons that have been learned from the first decade of the service’s existence and apply these to how the U.S.-led coalition should support its rebuilding…

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