“The true heir to Osama bin Laden (is) ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi... a ruthless battlefield tactician... shrewd strategist...."
-- David Ignatius, pumping Perpetual War for the Washington Post on June 10th
Sorry, David. They're in the crapper.
ISIS got where they are by taking over local Sunni militias in Syria. ISIS has never won a battle against a modern army. When they took over Mosul in Iraq and captured as many as 700 Air Force cadets at Tikrit, their successes related to bribery and Sunni officers betraying regular ISF troops.
Now, ISIS is worse off. Two major air strikes have taken out al-Baghdadi's core management group at al-Qa'im and severely bloodied the attack group running ISIS's Mosul operation.
Back on Friday, November 7th, an air strike destroyed vehicles connected with the lop level ISIS meeting at al-Qa'im, Iraq. The first strike came before dawn. Those missiles would not have been likely to destroy underground bunkers. Then a follow-up attack mid-morning on the 7th deployed a liquid-based bomb that produced a thermobaric shock wave -- more than sufficient overpressure to collapse any Saddam Era defensive structure.
[Photos of the after-blast plumes below le trump l'orange. These are leaked drone pics.]
Iraqi Member of Parliament Mohammed al-Karbouli issued a statement that the “international coalition aircraft targeted a meeting of ISIS leaders in Qaim city located west of Anbar which resulted in dozens of deaths and injuries and caused severe confusion among ISIS members who then cut off all roads in Qaim in order to transport their wounded to the hospital that was packed with the wounded and body parts.” For the Iraqi government, the term "Coalition" applies to everybody from their own aircraft to the Americans to Arab air forces to Iran and the Kurds. In direct questioning al-Karbouli and ISF's air command stated that the initial hit "flew out of Al Asad" air base. The much larger follow up bomb was carried by a helicopter out of Al Asad.
The effect of these hits and the other attack on ISIS by the Americans up at Mosul compounds the difficulties the organization has faced in Iraq since July.
The government of Iraq went public with an item reported in Asharq Al-Awsat (The Middle East) that the standard "surround-and-annihilate" tactic is planned for Mosul:
-- The Surround phase will be completed early in 2015.
-- Iraq Security Force projections call for 80,000 troops overall to do the "surround" tasks.
-- Artillery tasks are not addressed publicly.
-- The ground assault is projected to require 7,000 for urban fighting.
That is about what happened at Jurf al-Sakhar in proportion to the size of the ISIS force. The numbers are reasonable.
Iraq's Defense Minister, Khalid Al-Obeidi, had committed earlier to retaking Mosul. The Anbar Tribal Council backed up this statement, referring to the waves of air strikes and subsequent fall off to ISIS operations in Iraq.
At the same time the Kurdistan government has excellent sources inside Syria and they place the number of fighters available to ISIS at 200,000. This estimate, related last week by Fuad Hussein, the Kurds' Chief of Staff, runs five and tens times what you hear from the Pentagon, Israeli sources, and Baghdad.
Thing is, the Kurds' estimate includes all the local Syrian militias that ISIS absorbed.
These troops are low quality and critically their units are not readily portable. You are not going to see 200,000 raiders rolling over the Syria-Iraq border to defend Mosul. If you see 20,000 raiders sent down to try to do reinforcement, that will drain ISIS manpower all across Syria.
The number 200,000 will be quoted in propaganda out of our Perpetual War Party. But that's related to the ongoing annual/perpetual Budget Crisis for DoD and DHS, not what ISIS can do.
At this point we're seeing the Baghdad Plan from last June go ahead on schedule, all at lower risk than throwing out a big counterattack. The major adjustment goes to defeating ISIS one site at a time: Tikrit, Amerli, Jurf al-Sakhar.
Americans ??? For Iraqis these are the guys who lost to AQI 2003-2006 and then carried out "The Surge" in 2007 so AQI transformed into ISIS and took over central Syria.
Between Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians on the ground and in the air things are going very well indeed.
Up by Mosul, 300 miles from al-Qa'im, the U.S. Air Force made its own strike on the 7th:
Colonel Patrick Ryder, a [U.S.] Central Command spokesman specified that overnight strikes near al-Qaim also destroyed two ISIS checkpoints.
“I can confirm that coalition aircraft did conduct a series of air strikes yesterday evening in Iraq against what was assessed to be a gathering of ISIL leaders near Mosul,” said Ryder. At least 50 bodies were brought into Mosul's morgue, officials told Reuters.
Taking out the ISIS local leadership at Mosul has value. Whoever replaces them will lose time to setting up a new pecking order. They will have no time to weed out incompetents before ISF & Friends arrive for the party.
(Did these two meetings of Jihadis plan on using Skype ?)
A note: if you are interested, the birth name for al-Baghdadi is given as Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai. Born in Samarra, not Baghdad. He claims descent from The Prophet.
Whatever....
And if you missed the leaked drone images from al-Qa'im on the 7th:
The regular air strike.
And the aftermath after the thumper hit.
That second hit would have crushed any Saddam Era underground bunker.
We do not have tallies for civilian losses at al Qa'im. Expect the count to be bad, way up in the hundreds. Possibly into the thousands.