How Mosul’s Liberation Could Lead to Another Iraqi Civil War

Daniel L. Davis writes for Politico:

On a trip to northern Iraq toward the end of August, I interviewed the Kurdish commander of the Peshmerga 7^th Brigade, General Bahram Yassin, about the looming battle for Mosul. Speaking at his forward command post overlooking the leading ISIS defensive lines outside of Mosul, Yassin went into some detail about what he expects to happen when hostilities over this key city commence: hand-to-hand combat, human shields, entrenched ISIS fighters immune to airstrikes and all too happy to experience martyrdom.

ISIS has rigged buildings, roads, and other items to explode and planted IEDs in “virtually every road and every alley,” Yassin told me. “I expect that we’ll have to fight them, taking neighborhood by neighborhood, alley by alley, and sometimes house by house.” Since U.S. troops, artillery and air support will be involved, there could be American casualties.

Despite that fearful prospect, what concerned me most was is what Yassin said about what could happen after the liberation of Mosul. This is going to be a “coalition” offensive—but the coalition isn’t one of different countries. Everyone involved is Iraqi, but they consist of the fractious, mutually mistrustful constituents—Kurdish Peshmerga, Shia militias, the mixed-sectarian bag that is the Iraqi army—of a country that could still easily fall into civil war again after ISIS is defeated. Yassin said one of his major concerns is that binding political agreements won’t be in place prior to the fighting, and if there aren’t clearly articulated limits and responsibilities for each of the attacking forces, it’s not hard to imagine Sunni militias butting heads with Shia militias during the fighting, potentially coming to blows with each other.