The battle for Tikrit - a Tigris River town about 80 miles north of Baghdad - has been presented by Iraqi officers and their supporters as a spring-board for a successful assault on Mosul, the northern Iraqi city that the Islamic State seized last June.
Claims made last week that Tikrit, the hometown of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, was back in government hands have proved premature. Reuters reports that the Iraqi soldiers and Shiite militias fighting for control of the town have been stalled by the difficulties of urban combat and the improvised explosive devices and booby-traps that the Islamic State has laid in the town.
But if and when the battle for Tikrit is over, it may well contain more warnings than lessons for the much more difficult fight ahead in Mosul. Tikrit is about a third of the size of Mosul, and is 140 miles closer to Baghdad and the country's Shiite Arab dominated south. Maintaining supply routes that much further north will be harder and more dangerous, and IS fighters have held Mosul since last June, giving them over 8 months to prepare their defense.
And the character of the force coming to take back Mosul will give many of the Sunni Arab residents of the town pause. The stunning success of the Islamic State in Mosul was made possible by the behavior of the Shiite-dominated Iraqi army in the town, which treated its residents as vanquished enemies more than fellow Iraqis, and engaged in a range of protection rackets and theft preying on the local population.
Local anger at the sectarian nature of the Iraqi army in the area made the Islamic State's job a lot easier, as did the weak leadership and low morale of the troops stationed there, which saw Iraq's forces flee the city without putting up much of a fight.
Now a largely Shiite-dominated force is once again coming to "liberate" the city's residents. While the Shiite militias that will probably be in the vanguard, as they are in Tikrit, have more will to fight than the regular Iraqi army, many Sunni Arabs view them as death squads in waiting who will likely seek revenge on the city's population.
It hasn't helped that Gen. Qassem Soleimani, from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, has been repeatedly spotted directing operations in Tikrit, frequently surrounded by US-supplied weaponry. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose highly sectarian government sought to purge Sunni Arabs from Iraqi public life, has also visited with the militias on the outskirts of Tikrit.
While there do not appear to have been many reprisal killings so far, many of the Shiite militias working with Iran in the Tikrit area participated in the sectarian massacres during the US occupation of Iraq that reshaped the demographics of Baghdad and many other towns. Executions and torture were widespread on both sides.
Neither Iraq's militias nor its regular forces have cleaned up their acts in the years since. And Iraqi social media has been flooded with images of atrocities allegedly carried out by government forces, as ABC noted last week:
US-trained and armed Iraqi military units, the key to the American strategy against ISIS, are under investigation for committing some of the same atrocities as the terror group, American and Iraqi officials told ABC News. Some Iraqi units have already been cut off from US assistance over "credible" human rights violations, according to a senior military official on the Pentagon's Joint Staff.
Read the original:
Is winning in Tikrit really the key for Iraq retaking Mosul?