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Reuters
ERBIL
It has taken two years of training a demoralised army, and the backing of the air cover and special forces of the world's greatest powers, for Iraq to mount an offensive to recapture Mosul from Islamic State.
Almost a week into the US-led onslaught, many of those running the campaign say the battle to retake the city could be long and hard. But they have also identified what they think is a chink in the jihadists' armour.
If local fighters in Mosul can be persuaded to drop their allegiance to Islamic State, there is a chance that the battle can be brought to a more speedy conclusion, and that could have major implications for the future of Iraq.
Against a background of splits and rebellions in the Islamic State ranks in Mosul, some opposing commanders believe that a successful attempt to win over those local fighters could mean the battle will last only weeks rather than months.
Mosul, Iraq's second biggest city, is where IS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared his Sunni caliphate in 2014, after his alliance between millenarian Islamists and veteran officers from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein roared back into Iraq from bases they set up in Syria. Five Iraqi army divisions melted away in the face of a few hundred jihadists.
Now the battle to retake Mosul pits an unwieldy coalition of a 30,000-strong Iraqi regular force backed by the United States and European powers, alongside Kurdish and Shi'ite militias, against jihadists who have exploited the Sunni community's sense of dispossession in Iraq and betrayal in Syria.
The political sensitivity with which the battle is handled could determine the future of Islamic State and of Sunni extremism, as well as the shape of this part of the Middle East, which is being shattered into sectarian fragments.
Islamic State fighters, estimated at between 4,000 and 8,000, have rigged the city with explosives, mined and booby-trapped roads, built oil-filled moats they can set alight, dug tunnels and trenches, and have shown every willingness to use some of Mosul's 1.5 million civilians as human shields.
Islamic State seems to have a plentiful supply of suicide bombers, launching them in explosives-laden trucks against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters converging on Mosul from the east and northeast, and against Iraqi forces, spearheaded by counter-terrorism units, advancing from the south and southwest.
"Mosul will be a multi-month endeavour. This is going to take a long time," a senior US official said in Iraq.
Karim Sinjari, Interior Minister in the self-governing Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq, said IS would put up a fierce fight because of Mosul's symbolic value as capital of its self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.
"If Mosul is finished, the caliphate they announced is finished. If they lose in Mosul, they will have no place, just Raqqa (in Syria)," Sinjari said.
IS is adept at exploiting divisions among its enemies, and last Friday's dawn assault by its fighters on Kirkuk, for example, was not just an attempt to divert Iraqi and Kurdish forces and relieve pressure on the main front.
It was also intended to galvanise Sunni Arab opinion against the Kurds, whose Iraqi Peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish militia are the most effective ground forces deployed against IS.
That is why many of those involved in the battle for Mosul stress the need to break the cohesion of IS and the allegiance it has won or coerced among alienated Sunnis, in Mosul and beyond.
The opportunity is there, they say.
They believe that while foreign jihadists will fight to the finish to protect their last stronghold in Iraq, the Iraqi fighters, many from Mosul itself, may lay down their arms.
