Iraq Fights Back

Stratfor offers a good analysis of the progress the Iraq government is making against the rebel insurgents.

Reports indicate that the Iraqi army, aided by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has checked the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’s push south toward Baghdad. Forces allied with Baghdad apparently stopped the rebel fighters just north of As Samarra and have begun to venture north, reasserting control over large portions of Tikrit.

Additional Iraqi forces, and possibly Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elements, are deploying in Baghdad. U.S. President Barack Obama has said that any form of military response to the militants is on the table. The ability of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to maintain a conventional military threat north of Baghdad seems to have been strongly blunted. The group’s unconventional and insurgent tactics, however, will continue to undermine Iraqi security and stability.

Analysis

Iraqi security forces in Mosul comprised a full Iraqi army division supplemented by a federal police motorized division. When these forces folded in the face of a few thousand fighters, that collapse quickly spread to units directly to the south. Nearly the entire composition of the Nineveh and Tigris operational commands began a full-scale, unorganized retreat. The drawback involved three Iraqi army divisions, a federal police division and regionally deployed police battalions — a total of as many as 30,000 soldiers. Read more here.