The Islamic State has tunnels everywhere. It’s making ISIS much harder to defeat.
Yesterday, the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” on a network of Islamic State caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. The military said its spectacular use of force was necessary to destroy the underground terror hideout (though it's not clear that the MOAB was the right tool to accomplish that goal.) Tunnels are not just […]Amanda Erickson writes for The Washington Post:
Yesterday, the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” on a network of Islamic State caves and tunnels in Afghanistan. The military said its spectacular use of force was necessary to destroy the underground terror hideout (though it's not clear that the MOAB was the right tool to accomplish that goal.)
Tunnels are not just the purview of the Islamic State's small Afghanistan force. Like other guerrilla groups, the Islamic State has created tunnel systems underneath many of the cities and villages that they occupy. These pathways are essential to their strategy, enabling them to move stealthily, strike quickly and escape capture.
It's hard to know how many tunnels exist or where. But anecdotal reports suggest that the network is extensive. After Iraq troops began trying to take back Mosul in 2016, for example, Iraqi troops and the Kurdish peshmerga found that the road into the city had been honeycombed with tunnels, many booby-trapped. Mosul, too, had an extensive underlayer of pathways. As an Iraqi intelligence officer told my colleague last year, “they're everywhere.” The same was true underneath Fallujah.
