MESOP TODAY’S COMMENTARY : SUCCESS FOR KRG & PESHMERGA / THE NEW YORKER

DECEMBER 22, 2014 – An Early Success for the Kurds in Sinjar – BY DEXTER FILKINS

This week, some eight thousand members of the Kurdish army, called the peshmerga, launched a campaign to liberate Sinjar. They are backed by American jets, which have so far carried out more than fifty airstrikes on ISIS positions. (That brings the total number of American airstrikes against ISIS to more than thirteen hundred.) Less than two days into the operation, Kurdish officials said that they had liberated a string of villages and opened a land corridor to Sinjar Mountain, from which the surviving Yazidis can be evacuated. The officials added that the peshmerga had killed at least a hundred ISIS fighters and struck a grave blow to the enemy’s morale. One Kurdish official told me that when hundreds of ISIS fighters retreated to the city of Talafar, which is under ISIS control, they were turned back by their own men.

After months of ISIS advances, and the near total collapse of the Iraqi Army, the early success of the Sinjar operation has prompted celebrations among Kurdish leaders. “The operation is another victory for the peshmerga, the heroes of Kurdistan,’’ Masrour Barzani, the head of the security council for the Kurdish region, said. “It reaffirms their prowess as the only formidable force against ISIS capable of pushing the enemy back.”

For now, at least, it’s hard to argue with Barzani’s assessment. When ISIS first moved into Iraq in June, tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers dropped their guns and fled, allowing the group to capture large swathes of territory between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Along with Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, ISIS controls about a third of the country. Despite intense efforts by the Iraqi government and by the Obama Administration to recapture the lost territory—more than seventeen hundred Americans are on the ground helping the Iraqi Army, with more on the way—the results have so far been unimpressive. ISIS fighters remain embedded in many of the towns that encircle Baghdad and are dangerously near its international airport. In the operation to retake Sinjar, there was no involvement by the Iraqi Army, the Kurdish official told me.

Even so, there are some signs that the balance is beginning to tilt against ISIS. American officials said this week that they had killed three senior ISIS leaders. According to the Kurdish official I spoke to, the dead included Shihab Ahmad Hassan, the ISIS military commander for Mosul. Briefing reporters at the Pentagon this week, General James Terry, the commander of the American operation in Iraq, suggested that the American airstrikes had begun to wear down ISIS’s capability. “We’re not seeing the broad offensive movement we saw in May and June,’’ he said.

For the Kurds, regaining control of Sinjar would restore most of the territories they lost to the ISIS summer offensive. And while that would place them in control of the highway that runs into western Mosul, it’s unclear whether the Kurds would send troops there. Western Mosul, like the rest of the areas under ISIS control, are overwhelmingly Arab; the Kurds, who ultimately have independence on their minds, may be reluctant to try to take control of non-Kurdish lands.

That would leave recapturing western Mosul to the Iraqi Army. Even if the area is isolated and cut off, it seems hard to imagine that the Iraqi Army will be in any shape to move in soon. At his press conference, General Terry said that restoring the Iraqi Army was no small job. “I still think we’re—in terms of building some of the capabilities that are required there—probably about three years down the road, minimum.”