Iraq Surrounds Anbar--and Might Actually Succeed in its Offensive

I'll continue to contend that the Iraqis are much better on offense than they are on defense: even with ISIS well dug-into a city and planting bombs everywhere, the Iraqis can slowly slog forward, in part because they're confident they're unlikely to get captured and tortured by ISIS troops when the Iraqi troops have managed to surround a city and besiege it.

Ramadi will be like Tikrit: Iraqi forces have surrounded the city completely, and are working on shoring up supply/reinforcement lines, positioning troops, and training local volunteers before moving in. The Shiite militias, who might otherwise pose a major problem in the occupation of Ramadi, are staying on the outskirts to block ISIS reinforcements and prevent retreating ISIS troops from getting away to launch a counter-attack. In part, they'll stand "at the back of" Iraqi regulars and Sunni militiamen.

Unlike Tikrit, US airstrikes will be involved from the start. These airstrikes made the capture of Tall Abyad (Syria) and Baiji (north on the map below) much quicker. Recall that the airstrikes also ended the very stalled siege of Tikrit.

Note as well that Iraqi troops are holding al-Baghdadi and Haditha, which means that reinforcements from Syria would have to go through miles of Iraqi checkpoints, and retreat from Ramadi into Syria would be difficult--again, a good sign for preventing a counter-attack in the future.

The Iraqis are also working on surrounding Fallujah. The map here is actually a bit out of date: the Iraqis claim they've captured the dam and secured the river south of the city, and are "at the gates" of Fallujah. Trying to take both cities at once will be a meat grinder, but it's important: if only one was attacked and the other left open, ISIS troops could retreat from one to the other, only to counter-attack later. Besieging both means that ISIS troops in both cities are isolated (this tactic was used to great effect by the Communist Chinese forces against the Nationalists), and the Iraqis can take their time, advance slowly, and strike where ISIS has been softened up by airstrikes.

In Anbar, time is on the Iraqis' side. Because they're training local militiamen--in large part to keep the peace after the fighting as credible local forces--they may even stretch out the operation, as painful as it seems to consider. Forces from al-Baghdadi may also advance towards Hit and try to guarantee no safe haven for ISIS troops after the Ramadi and Fallujah assaults.

This is a case where Iraq's strategy is to accept the hard fight, take the American's help, and try to eliminate (rather than simply dislodge) ISIS forces in Anbar. Doing so will mean that fewer troops will have to stay behind to garrison Anbar (and many fewer will need to garrison surrounding Baghdad, which remains under threat from ISIS' presence in Fallujah), and thus that more can be committed to the final brutal push towards Mosul.

Expect fighting in both cities to start up within the week.

How the Battle Lines Against ISIS in Iraq Have Moved Over Time

To show progress against ISIS in Iraq, the Pentagon put out a graphic that is somewhat comically difficult to understand. But after the Pentagon's disastrous Powerpoint slide on Afghanistan, we've come to expect little else.

So I decided I'd work with the fine folks in Wikipedia (thanks, guys!) to make a GIF that shows how the battle lines have moved since the ISIS offensive with a few pointers about key events. It's not perfect, but I think it's a big improvement.

Enjoy, and feel free to share or put in your own content.

(Click here for an even larger size.)

And in case you want to look at the photos individually below:

Iraqi Forces Enter Tikrit; Victory Looks Certain

Iraqi forces have Tikrit surrounded, after a week-long slog of clearing out bombs and snipers along the roads leading into the city.

They are entering the city from all sides now, attempting to squeeze out (and ideally eliminate during retreat) ISIS forces holed up inside. I believe at this point that victory is fairly inevitable, and that they'll move on next to clear ISIS forces currently combating government / Shiite troops in Baji. Expect the area below to become quite red after ISIS forces break.

The going will be slow now that they're in the city: ISIS predicted this was coming and scattered snipers and booby traps throughout the city, in the hopes of causing enough casualties to break the spirits of government troops.

(Twitter user @PetoLucem has a great chronological progression of government advances in Tikrit over the past few weeks, via Stratfor)

But it won't happen. The most important part of this offensive is that Iraqi forces do not break and run, and I suspect they won't. Iraq has hand-picked more reliable forces for this offensive, and the backing of very zealous Shiite militiamen and Iranian Quds forces is going to keep morale high as they demonstrate high morale and relative courage in the fighting. The total forces assaulting the city number a staggering 30,000, which likely outnumbers ISIS forces by about 10:1. There are just so many weapons pointed at ISIS forces that they will eventually get squeezed into defeat.

Expect the city to be cleared in 1-2 weeks as forces very slowly and carefully move house-to-house, hoping to minimize casualties. Baji will fall more quickly after that; it has many fewer ISIS fighters and government forces are already in the city, which will prevent the kind of entrenchment that ISIS was able to manage in Tikrit.

Implications
ISIS' days in Iraq are numbered, I think. Tikrit will be the victory the Iraqis need to build the morale and template for taking Mosul, which will allow them to turn their attention to Ramadi and Fallujah--those will be the hardest fights they have, but they'll have momentum on their side: Iraqi forces will inherit ISIS' air of inevitability.

ISIS' aura of inevitability and terror is starting to fizzle as they begin to lose to superior firepower, numbers, and training. That loss will hurt long-term recruiting, which means they'll actually be ground down to the point that they'll have to revert to asymmetric warfare (they set of 12 simultaneous car/suicide bombs in Ramadi and one bomb in Baghdad to try to disrupt the assault on Tikrit, for example). But because ISIS is claiming to be a caliphate, their authority erodes if they don't hold territory.

With victory coming, the most important factor in this advance is making sure that Shiite militiamen don't use this opportunity to carry out sectarian revenge killings. If they're able to keep their cool (and so far it's looking like they are, but the hard part will be after the main fighting ends) and leave Sunni civilians alone, the prospects for Fallujah and Ramadi will improve as Sunni civilians there begin to hope that government forces are a viable alternative to ISIS (they had previously probably helped ISIS to take hold there because they were so frustrated with Shiite rule in Iraq, but ISIS became more than they had bargained for).

Meanwhile, the Kurds in Syria continue a slow, steady slog towards the Tall Abyad border crossing with Turkey, which would close down a supply and reinforcement route (for foreign fighters) into Syria.