“Mosul will be the most complex operation to date”, McGurk said, warning that a million civilians from diverse ethnic and religious groups are still inside the city.
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The number of member fighters of the group has decreased by at least a third, while recruiting has slowed and defections have increased, he added in a joint press conference with US Secretary of Defence Ash Carter. “But it is important to come in underneath the military liberation with the type of support for rebuilding, for health, for education, to be able to make sure that we’re not leaving the door open for a disgruntlement or the revisiting of Daesh [IS] that undoes the liberation itself”.
But British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said he did not feel the military planning was ahead of the civilian post-war planning.
But defense ministers from the Western and Arab countries of the coalition now have a military plan to liberate the cities with local Iraqi and Syrian forces. He said “everything is booby-trapped”, including the rubble, and the people won’t have the confidence to return unless the explosives are cleared away.
US officials on Thursday called on partners in the coalition against Islamic State to increase information sharing to counter the militant group’s expanding reach beyond Iraq and Syria, and said a victory in the northern city of Mosul was now in sight.
This is the fourth time that Carter has convened an anti-Islamic State coalition meeting.
Chris Woods of the monitoring group Airwars viewed these reports as particularly troubling because the United States and its coalition partners have generally taken great pains to avoid civilian casualties, unlike the Russians and Syrian government forces. In addition to humanitarian aid, the money will be used for the immediate stabilization efforts once the militants are driven from Mosul, the operations to remove explosives and long-term recovery assistance.
An Iraq donor meeting of 24 countries in Washington yesterday was expected to raise more than US$2 billion, a senior State Department official told reporters on Monday. But Carter met with Kurdish President Masoud Barazani and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi when he visited Iraq last week.
Also in Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a separate donor conference to help Iraq against IS.
The coalition is anxious to ensure that the recapture of the city – which has a complex ethnic structure – does not lead to political or military infighting, as rival groups try to fill the power vacuum caused by the defeat of Islamic State.
“The new challenge that we face is securing and aiding in the recovery of a liberated area”, Kerry told the two dozen foreign ministers and ambassadors in attendance.
The gathering comes on the heels of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation summit in Warsaw earlier this month, when allies agreed to boost support for the anti-IS mission, including the launch of a training and capacity-building mission for Iraqi armed forces in Iraq.
They have recaptured the Qayyara air base south of Mosul, which United States military officials say will serve as a launch pad for offensive operations against the city.
Kerry said he hasn’t yet seen the formal extradition request and that anything sent to the U.S. Department of Justice must meet the “very strict set of requirements” the U.S. demands before an extradition can take place.
The US already has information-sharing agreements with 55 global partners, while at least 50 countries now provide profiles on foreign terrorist fighters to Interpol, he revealed, welcoming its addition to the coalition.
The airstrikes Mughrabi referred to were conducted around the ISIS-controlled city of Manbij, which is the last major Islamic State holding along Syria’s northern border with Turkey.
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With that goal in mind, he emphasized the importance of the meeting now under way, placing special emphasis not only on military coordination between the coalition members but also on exchanging intelligence, both of which are key in avoiding jihadist attacks in Western nations.
