As ISIS Loosens Grip, U.S. and Iraq Prepare for Grinding Insurgency by Michael Schmidt and Eric Schmitt, New York Times
The Islamic State’s latest suicide attack in Baghdad, which killed nearly 330 people, foreshadows a long and bloody insurgency, according to American diplomats and commanders, as the group reverts to its guerrilla roots because its territory is shrinking in Iraq and Syria.
Already, officials say, many Islamic State fighters who lost battles in Falluja and Ramadi have blended back into the largely Sunni civilian populations there, and are biding their time to conduct future terrorist attacks. And with few signs that the beleaguered Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, can effectively forge an inclusive partnership with Sunnis, many senior American officials warn that a military victory in the last urban stronghold of Mosul, which they hope will be achieved by the end of the year, will not be sufficient to stave off a lethal insurgency.
“To defeat an insurgency, Iraq would need to move forward on its political and economic reform agenda,” Lt. Gen. Sean B. MacFarland, the top American commander in Iraq, said in an email.
A return to guerrilla warfare in Iraq, while the United States and its allies still combat the Islamic State in Syria, would pose one of the first major challenges to the next American president, who will take office in January. American public opinion has so far supported President Obama’s deployment of roughly 5,000 troops to help Iraq reclaim territory it lost to the Islamic State in 2014, but it is not clear whether political support would dissipate in a sustained effort to fight insurgents…
Comments
I am not sure why this is any surprise.
We walked into Baghdad in 2003 and stepped into a full blown Phase Two guerrilla war being driven by various Salafist groups against Saddam since 1991 and the only Takfirist group at that time that had joined this fight was QJBR (IS) in the mid to late 1990s.
When IS conducted their invasion out of Syria taking control of large Sunni areas they just shifted to the Phase Three guerilla war and now they are losing territory so they simply are shifting back to a Phase Two...
Mao foresaw this possibility in his Three Phase Guerrilla War Concept....
During their Phase Two efforts when the US Army was in Iraq...both then QJBR/AQI and the Sunni Salafist insurgency effectively fought the US Army to a standstill, so I am not sure why this is a "breaking development"????
Especially since IS after losing Ramadi and Fallujah are now killing far more Iraqi ISF/Shia militia and destroying more armored vehicles using typical guerrilla hit and run tactics than during the fighting in both towns.....and have turned back to their classical cruise missile the SVBIED.....
Even after the US military fully focused on the destruction of AQI the Sunni Salafist insurgency continued on with their killing and wounding of US military personnel as we never did fully focus on the actual Sunni Salafist insurgency as our full attention was on AQI....