Truck loads of critical gear and medicines were evacuated out of Mosul last week. Eye witness accounts from Mosul backed up by Kurdish eye-on-the-ground sources had them leaving the town headed up Route 1 toward al-Qamishli in Syria.
Meanwhile on the Coalition side in Anbar the large-scale surround-and-annihilate tactic that worked so well at Jurf al-Sakhar has been set aside in favor of attacking small pockets of ISIS using local intelligence reports for sourcing. The Coalition appears to have adapted more or less immediately to a change by ISIS. ISIS was formerly Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and they went back to tactics they used back in 2005-2008.
Clearly, there's no point to trying to lay siege to an ISIS-controlled town in an area where there are no ISIS controlled towns. The map looks about like it did a week ago:
Coalition sources in Tikrit report that aerial sorties in the red and purple areas are finding fewer targets to go after. Either ISIS assets have gone to ground or the early estimates for their strength from Western intelligence overstated their actual numbers. Small ISIS raiding parties still present in the Coalition area. These appear to be suicide actions.
Still, even with fewer targets on the board, it is all to the good to have more than 100 aerial sorties available over any 24 hour planning span. Strikes can be concentrated to Ramadi and Mosul and environs. For example, controlling traffic between cities for the Falluja-Ramadi-Barwana-Qa'im corridor relies on protecting check points that are at risk of being overrun by ISIS attack groups.
As matters stand, air support out of the Ain Al Asad base is tuned to taking out the ever popular "suicide chain" attack groups. Response times are down to a few minutes. Artillery at the check points has also been upgraded, along with closer ties to Sunni tribes which have had their own troubles with ISIS to the tune of more than 1,000 people killed.
K.I.S.S.: from the Iraqi side this is a war against psychopaths.
The enemy is dangerous, often lethal in ways that are not expected. Psy Ops tactics go to convincing Sunni locals that these enemies are Sunni Salafi Saudis and other Salafi educated foreigners. And that their savagery exceeds Saddam and what the Americans did at Abu Ghraib.
Iraqi Security Force, a.k.a. the Iraqi army, points out that these enemy troops are not fit, mentally, to operate as a disciplined army. Many are Saudis and religious school products from Saudi financed operations across MENA, Chechnya, and Pakistan. Many of the ISIS troops are technologically uneducated, unfamiliar with modern manufactured goods to the point of being primitive. All they know is guns.
Pentagon Groks the Friedman Unit
Yes, indeed. The Pentagon is running its Planning Horizon and its investments for local improvement in Iraq to fit in almost exactly six months behind what we see on the ground. This is not a F.U. of expectations. It is a F.U. of actual planning.
One Friedman Unit. That's the new goal. Here, a six month lag between what happens and where they are spending money.
As close to six months as they can get it. Six months to the day for getting plans out of sync with events on the ground. Here's the Joint Chief's spokesman, Rear Adm. John Kirby at his January 06, 2015 presser:
Q: On ISIS, can you give us an update of your sense of where ISIS's relative strength is right now, what their momentum is, what impact at this point now, after several months, you feel that airstrikes have had against them? What have you seen about ISIS on the ground, now?O.K., fine. The ISIS invasion was "blunted" back in July, 2014, when their attack group at the west side of Tikrit was overrun after being surrounded and pounded with Coalition artillery. Defeats at Amerli and Jurf al-Sakhar and staggering losses to artillery and air attacks weakened them ever since. Not a day goes by that some bunch of ISIS troops doesn't get their date with martyrdom or Hell or oblivion.KIRBY: I think the short answer to your question is that we very much see ISIL largely in a defensive posture inside Iraq, that whatever momentum that they had been enjoying has been halted, has been blunted. That has stayed steady over the last couple of weeks.
Even as we were working through the holidays, we were monitoring this and, as you know, conducting airstrikes.
But nobody is taking that progress for granted. There are parts of, as you know, they still maintain control over Mosul. There are parts of Anbar that are still being contested: Ramadi in particular.
They continue to threaten the city of Baiji, very much want -- as you know, ISF has control of the refinery. ISIL continues to dispute that ownership.
And they continue to threaten Yazidis in and around Mount Sinjar.
So, it's very much a contested environment, but what we don't see, what we haven't seen in the last several weeks has been any renewed offensive moves by ISIL of any significance. They have largely taken a defensive posture in the last several weeks.
July to January 6th. That's the Pentagon's Close Enough for one Friedman Unit.
ISIS at Tikrit was surrounded and started taking artillery barrages early July, then got overrun on the 18th. Call a date for when they were "blunted" -- arguably the Pentagon could be getting their F.U. Info Lag right to the day!
And the poor Yazidis were relieved weeks ago by the same 4,000 Kurds who retook Sinjar and drove that ISIS unit back east to Tal Afar (on a line toward Mosul.)
Them dozen new units to get trained ??? Figure that to start for real six months after the Coalition moves its 80,000 man army north, surrounds Mosul, starts an in-force siege, then takes a couple months to wipe out the remaining ISIS dead-enders. (There the phrase "dead-enders" is entirely accurate.)
There are indeed people who know what's happening in Iraq. Not NY Times, they speak Iraqi-English working at it, and dollars-to-doughnuts there's nobody in the crew name of "Friedman." Access is not restricted.