Tikrit Falls to Iraqi Forces; US Solidifies Role as Leader Against ISIS

Tikrit has fallen.

Mop-up operations are underway, but the Iraqi national flag now flies over the city, and ISIS is broken.

Iraqi forces should be moving quickly north to secure the Baji road and oil refinery before securing, regrouping, and supporting Ramadi to make sure the ISIS advance there is halted. And then, of course, there will be a few-months' ramp-up to take Mosul.

Key Takeaways:

The advance into Tikrit was halted around March 6th as the army/Shiite militias faced heavy sniper fire and dug-in pockets of resistance.

US airstrikes started up just under a week ago after the Iraqi government requested the support to break ISIS resistance. Those airstrikes prompted most of the 20,000 Shiite militiamen--who generally don't like the US and see themselves as more closely aligned with Iranian interests--to boycott the siege and go home, leaving about 3,000 Iraqi Army troops, 1,000 Sunni fighters, and about 2,000 Shiite fighters. It left a lot of glaring holes in the siege.

But the airstrikes proved decisive.

After softening ISIS targets (which had probably thought themselves unlikely to have to face such airstrikes), the US suspended its operations and the Shiite militias quickly came back to launch the final assault.

The city fell one day after the air campaign, after 3 weeks of no progress.

The US is gloating a bit, and with good reason. US officials are taking the opportunity to show that Iran can't alone support the Iraqi advance. This is a precedent-setting kind of event: the US was "snubbed" last month when Iraq's government moved into Tikrit with Shiite militias and Iranian ground support, without informing the US or requesting support.

Giving in to request the support was a sign the Iraqis had realized they need it. The fact that the city was taken so quickly after the strikes cements the US' future role.

This means one of two things: either the US and Iran will work more closely together, or the Iranians will have a much-reduced role in the Iraqi offensives in the future.

This cementing also means that the US is going to be leading the assault on Mosul, which is about 20x larger than Tikrit and has many more ISIS fighters dug in. It's clear that the Mosul operation is a non-starter without that air support.

Shiite militias will make a lot of noise about not needing the US, but I do believe that Tikrit will be weighing heavily on their minds when they are planning the Mosul advance, and that despite the high tensions, the militias will begrudgingly go in with US air support.

It's worth noting: Tikrit probably had far more than the 2,000 ISIS fighters initially estimated--the Iraqi government cites about 13,000, but this is probably inflated. The good news is that this means the Iraqis have shown that they can win with about 2:1 odds, rather than the 10:1 or 15:1 previously thought. Mosul also has about 12,000 ISIS fighters, so the fight will not be an order-of-magnitude difference (though will obviously take much longer and be more complicated due to Mosul being about 20x larger in land mass).

But ongoing US airstrikes are making it hard for ISIS to dig in as deeply as it would like, and the ISIS governor ("Prince of Mosul") and Mosul's top ISIS military commander have both been killed by airstrikes.

Quick Update: Advances Against ISIS, and What to Expect in Tikrit

Readers keep telling me they love the maps, so you get maps and a bit of "implications." We'll also touch very briefly on Tikrit.

1) Kurdish forces out of Kobane have successfully pressed ISIS out of the space west of Kobane by trapping them against the river/lake and eliminating them. They've made modest progress in the east but I think we can expect the Kurdish forces to shift a bit south, but mostly east, to capture Tall Abyad crossing and cut off a supply line for ISIS from Turkey.

2) In northeast Sryia, ISIS has totally collapsed. That huge box on the right was all formerly ISIS, right up to the southern edge of that big red blotch (government fighters). It appears the Kurds and government troops have a truce, which has allowed them to push out. There is likely a bit of a "race" to secure space around Hasakah between Peshmerga and government forces. We also see in the western box that Kurdish forces have successfully crossed a river and are assaulting villages there, likely hoping to scoop up the smattering of black just to the south.

3) From the department of "great things come in small packages," the Kurds have successfully captured the roadway and villages around the bridge where Route 1 crosses the Tigris, cutting Mosul off from its most direct western supply line. This is a form of kicking the proverbial hornet's nest that may bring ISIS fighters out of dug-in fortifications to try to take the highway back. They're going to have plenty of time--Iraqi forces will be bogged down in Tikrit for a while.

4) Iraqi forces are probably trying to encircle Ramadi by taking villages to its north (lower-left box) and have entered Tikrit. In Tikrit, government forces are similarly trying to encircle the city before moving in, and are being slowed down by roadside/car bombs and suicide bombers. The little black dot south of Tikrit is being shelled at time of writing, and the dot to the north of Tikrit is being de-bombed.

Once Tikrit is surrounded, it may take up to a month to move in and finish off ISIS forces. Iraq is sporting 25,000 troops between regulars, Shiite militias, and Sunni militias. They likely outnumber ISIS forces 10:1--but just remember that Iraqi forces had similar odds when they were overrun in Mosul last summer.

Iran is supporting this operation rather than the US, which means no air support. It's clearly not an experiment ("can Iraqi forces handle this on their own?")--now's just not the time to be having such experiments, as Tikrit is probably the junior varsity version of trying to take Mosul.

What's more likely--I think--is that Iraq and Iran are going alone, without US "permission." Iraq has been frustrated with coalition support and it's possible (though I have predicted otherwise) that the US announcement of the Mosul offensive created some distrust--Iraq may have decided that the US couldn't be trusted with the intel.

Evidence suggests the US wasn't even told about the offensive--a US general said that the offensive was "no surprise," which is very different from saying "we're in the loop."

It'll be great news if Iraq can take Tikrit without US air support, though there are huge complications with making this a "Shiite" operation--Shiite militia abuse is a big part of why ISIS was able to get traction in western Iraq in the first place.

But we'll deal with that another time.