Degrade and Destroy by Michael R. Gordon

Author:Michael R. Gordon [Gordon, Michael R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub

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WHILE ALL EYES were focused on East Mosul, ISIS set its sights on Kirkuk. In the push to Mosul, the United States and the Iraqis had sidestepped Hawija, the site of the 2015 prison raid and an ISIS stronghold firmly under the militants’ control. The decision had expedited the Mosul offensive, but now the Americans and the Iraqis were paying the price. ISIS’s October 21 attack reflected an impressive degree of preparation. The fighters had scoped out the target, knew where to position themselves, had calculated how their adversary was likely to respond to the assault, and were poised to exploit the attack for the maximum public relations effect.

Kurdish intelligence and interrogations of captured militants indicated that more than a hundred fighters moved stealthily in the night from Hawija to the outskirts of Daquq, where they were met early in the morning by seven trucks operated by drivers who knew the streets and alleyways of Kirkuk. Others had snuck in previously and were hiding in safe houses. While the city was still asleep, ISIS fighters, equipped with GPS locators, rushed to seize several tactically advantageous spots, including the tall buildings outside the emergency police headquarters, where they used snipers to bottle up Kirkuk’s security forces. Still more militants took up positions in the Snowbar Hotel, which gave them a commanding view of the heavily secured compound where Najmaldin Karim, the governor of Kirkuk province, and his aides worked.

When the first reports of the attack came in, Karim, who had dual U.S. and Iraqi citizenship, was at his residence trying to keep up with the American election campaign via cable television. The governor’s first call was to Lahur Talabani, the head of the Kurdish counterterrorism unit based in nearby Sulaymaniyah. He rushed to Kirkuk with his brother Polad, their men, and a small number of Delta Force operators. ISIS fighters had expected as much, and had laid an ambush for the reinforcements, whom they targeted with RPGs. The counterterrorism unit was forced to take a roundabout route as a result. ISIS also began to run suicide car-bomb attacks at frontline Peshmerga forces so they could not be diverted to Kirkuk. “What they did to us inside Kirkuk was by far the worst we have ever seen,” Polad Talabani told me when I arrived in the area a few days after the assault.

The militants’ media arm was poised to exploit the attack. ISIS told its captive audience in Mosul that it had achieved a dramatic victory in Kirkuk and incorporated another famous Middle East city into the caliphate. As the firefights continued in Kirkuk, a video was posted on YouTube. A parade of honking cars took to the streets in Mosul as the success was lauded in man-on-the-street interviews. Kirkuk was a city of immense symbolic importance for the Kurds, one they had claimed as their own when the Iraqi Army dissolved after Mosul was seized in June 2014. The longer Kirkuk’s fate hung in the balance, the greater ISIS’s propaganda gain, one that would only steel the resolve of its Mosul-based fighters.

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