BAGHDAD
— Struggling to regain the initiative after a long impasse in the
battle against Islamic State militants, the Iraqi government and the
American-led coalition are for the first time in months putting military
pressure on the jihadists on multiple fronts, officials say.
Supported
by increased American air power, Iraqi forces are on the outskirts of
Ramadi, pressing to encircle the capital of Anbar Province, which the
militants took in May, and cut it off from resupply and reinforcements.
To
the north of Baghdad, Iraqi military forces and Iranian-backed Shiite
militias are trying to expand their foothold at the Baiji oil refinery
after retaking it from the Islamic State on Friday.
And
in northeast Syria, the American military last week said it had
parachuted 50 tons of ammunition to Syrian Arab fighters. The intent was
that those fighters would join a larger body of Kurdish forces in
advancing toward Raqqa, the Islamic State’s capital in Syria, and
perhaps draw some Islamic State fighters away from Iraq to defend the city.
“We
are doing what you always try to do to the enemy and that is force him
to fight in more than one direction at the same time,” said Lt. Gen.
Sean B. MacFarland, who last month became the American commander for the
effort in Iraq and Syria. He had previously served in Iraq as a brigade commander who worked with the Sunni tribes in Anbar Province.
The
campaign that General MacFarland inherited is not on the timetable
originally envisioned. The United States Central Command, which oversees
American operations in the Middle East, had once hoped that Mosul,
Iraq’s second-largest city, would be in the Iraqi government’s hands by
now.
Instead,
the American-led coalition has found itself trying to jump-start a
counteroffensive against the Islamic State in a region in which the
Russians and Iranians are asserting themselves in neighboring Syria, and
Shiite militias remain a potent political force in Iraq. At the same
time, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq has been struggling to
build up his authority.
Even
as the Iraqis have moved on the offensive, they face formidable
challenges. Ramadi, for example, is defended by 600 or more militants
who have fortified their positions and are still able to sneak fighters
to the city on the Euphrates River.
And
even if the Iraqis succeed in evicting the Islamic State from many of
their strongholds, holding them will be a challenge. While Iraqi tribes
can help secure some towns and cities, Iraqi provincial police are also
supposed to play an important role. But the training of those police
forces is just in the early phases: So far, a small team of Italian
Carabinieri has trained just 246 police officers, about half of whom are
federal police, officials said.
But
after a long lull, partly imposed by scorching heat and Muslim
holidays, the Iraqis and their partners are trying to put the militants
on the defensive and force them out of some long-held bastions into the
open where they can be more readily targeted by airstrikes, Iraqi
officials said.
The aim, Iraq’s defense minister, Khaled al-Obeidi, said in an interview, is “to busy the enemy on different axes.”
As
described by American officials and their allies, the overall strategy
is less a product of clockwork synchronization than taking advantage of
opportunities that have arisen in recent weeks.
Credit Pool photo by Khalid Mohammed
The
first step to speed up the Ramadi offensive was taken in late August
when Mr. Abadi appointed a new head of the Anbar Operations Command,
Maj. Gen. Ismail Mahalawi, who he hoped would be more aggressive than
his predecessor, who had been wounded in a mortar attack.
Some
10,000 Iraqi troops have been trying to isolate the city, advancing
from the north, west, south and southeast. One of their key objectives
is a bridge that spans the Euphrates northwest of the city, which Iraqi
forces want to take in order to stop the Islamic State from using the
river to bring in reinforcements.
For
the first time, Iraqi F-16 warplanes with pilots trained in the Arizona
desert have joined other allied warplanes in carrying out airstrikes to
support Iraqi ground troops, officials said.
The
Islamic State fighters holding Ramadi, American officials say, are
accomplished in combining terrorist tactics, like the use of suicide car
bombs, with more conventional military tactics like rigging houses with
explosive traps and packing stretches of road with explosives and then
covering the areas with mortar and sniper fire.
To
help the Iraqi military forge a path through the fortifications, the
United States is providing the Iraqi forces with armored bulldozers and
mine-clearing devices in which a cable festooned with explosives is
fired across the battlefield and then detonated.
Progress
has been slow despite increased supporting fire from American air
operations — about 70 strikes in the past two weeks, according to the
Pentagon. An Iraqi unit advanced to an apartment complex on the southern
fringe of the city in recent days only to withdraw after the militants
counterattacked.
While
Iraqi soldiers have been edging toward Ramadi, about 5,000 Iraqi
soldiers and national police officers, along with around 10,000 Shiite
militia fighters, have been mounting a parallel push in and around the
Baiji refinery. Militants are still being pursued in the nearby town of
Baiji, where some neighborhoods have been battered by artillery and
airstrikes and many electrical cables have been severed.
The
refinery itself, a sprawling installation that has changed hands
several times in fighting over the past year, has been so damaged it
will probably take years to restore it to full use, officials say. But
it is still considered an important installation, and its location is
strategically vital: Control of the surrounding area would provide a
potential steppingstone for any eventual Iraqi offensive against the
Islamic State in the northern province of Nineveh, where the militants
control the major city of Mosul.
Long-term
control of Baiji would also improve the security of the two major Iraqi
cities to the south — Tikrit and Samarra — and would curtail access to a
major road to the southwest that the Islamic State has been using to
funnel fighters from Mosul to Anbar.
The Baiji offensive is being overseen by Maj. Gen. Juma al-Jubouri, from the Iraqi military’s command center in Salahuddin.
But
Iraq and the American-led coalition are not the only ones who have a
stake in the success. So important is this juncture of the campaign that
Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of Iran’s paramilitary Quds Force,
arrived on the scene last week, apparently to help guide some of the
Shiite militias that Iran has been supporting, American officials said.
The
Baiji offensive is a critical one for Mr. Abadi, who is facing internal
political pressures within his Shiite coalition to show some progress
and who is dealing with militias who have a mind of their own. Officials
say allowing the militias to take a major role in that fight eases some
of those tensions and also routes most of the militias away from the
Ramadi offensive, where a major presence of the irregular forces might
alienate the mostly Sunni population or lead to sectarian abuses.
The
Iraqi government’s reliance on militia forces there is also partly a
reflection of how efforts to train and equip army units, which American
officials believe should conduct the main counteroffensive against the
Islamic State, have lagged behind goals set last year. That objective
was to train 12 brigades, but the readjusted goal is eight, officials
said: six Iraq Army brigades and two Kurdish ones.
Still,
the participation of the militias is a sensitive issue for the United
States, which has made clear that it will conduct airstrikes only to
support Iraqi government forces.
At
the Americans’ insistence, Iraq’s counterterrorism services, the
federal police and the Iraq Army were given the lead in the Baiji
operation. But the Shiite militia fighters have clearly benefited from
the weeks of United States bombing.
“Look,
we’re trying to do this cleanly,” said one senior American officer in
Washington, meaning supporting only Iraq forces, not the Iranian-trained
militias, “but in Iraq, it’s just never that clean.”
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