Iraq Liberates Fallujah From ISIS. Now the Hard Part Begins
When the Iraqi government declared victory on Sunday after routing Islamic State gunmen from the key city of Fallujah, it cleared a major hurdle on the way to a much larger and more complicated fight for the ISIS-held city of Mosul in northern Iraq. The victory in Fallujah deprives ISIS of an important territorial asset, […]When the Iraqi government declared victory on Sunday after routing Islamic State gunmen from the key city of Fallujah, it cleared a major hurdle on the way to a much larger and more complicated fight for the ISIS-held city of Mosul in northern Iraq.
The victory in Fallujah deprives ISIS of an important territorial asset, a city 40 miles west of Baghdad from which jihadists directed a lethal campaign of car bombings in the capital. Now all eyes turn north, toward Mosul, the largest city still under ISIS control and the most significant strategic prize in the land campaign against the terror group.
The recapture of Fallujah provides hints—some promising, some foreboding—about how the fight for Mosul might proceed. The operation demonstrated how rival U.S. and Iranian-backed forces can avoid conflict and even cooperate in the battle against ISIS, but major questions remain about how to secure and rebuild Fallujah, resettle the tens of thousands of civilians who fled the fighting and establish a sustainable peace in a city that has long been riven by sectarian divisions.
