Days before Mosul’s capture, pleas to Iraq’s top generals fell on deaf ears

NINEVEH PROVINCE // Five days before Iraq's second largest city fell into the hands of an Al Qaeda splinter group, two of the country's most senior army commanders strode into a room at a military base within Mosul's airport and took seats before a group of anxious local politicians.
Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Levant had already begun their fierce assault to capture the city and the two generals had just arrived from Baghdad to oversee the defence of the city.
See map of ISIL's push towards Baghdad
During a series of frantic meetings, local leaders urged them to avoid civilian causalities in the attempt to repel the militants and offered to coordinate their efforts.
The generals appeared to show little understanding of their concerns.
"That day the military started attacking the city with artillery and other strikes," said Noufal Al Aqoub, who heads the legislative committee of Nineveh province's regional council. "We asked them to stop these random attacks. We said, 'Make this a last resort. Let us evacuate the areas first'." The generals ignored their pleas.
In less than a week, ISIL had captured Mosul in fighting that killed scores of residents, forced hundreds of thousands to flee and left the Iraqi military in tatters.
The two generals – Abboud Qanbar, head of Baghdad's operational command, and Ali Gheidan, who heads Iraq's ground forces – had escaped to a nearby military base controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga forces, before boarding a plane back to Baghdad.
The scenes of chaos that led to the fall of Mosul and the disintegration of the United States-trained and funded military paved the way for ISIL's success. In the days that followed, its fighters captured huge swaths of territory, in an offensive that took them to within 60km of Baghdad. The campaign threatens to dismember Iraq and ignite full-scale sectarian war between Sunnis and Shiites.
Mosul fell to a well-planned assault by an ISIL force likely backed by other tribal militia and Baathist militants once loyal to Saddam Hussein. But the meeting between the generals and councilmen shows how public anger at the central government and deep distrust of the military played into the militants' hands.
Residents of the city had long complained of the way security forces conducted themselves in Mosul. Arbitrary arrests and beatings were commonplace because of a 2005 antiterror law that gave authorities sweeping powers. Like many Sunnis in Iraq, Mosul's residents began to see the largely Shiite force as a sectarian tool.
"Many people of Mosul did not oppose ISIL activities because the military and security forces are seen as a Shiite force and the people who they arrested and harassed in the city are largely Sunni," said Sirwan Zahawi, an analyst and former Iraqi parliamentarian. "That made the city ripe for the taking."
The generals were dispatched to Mosul by Nouri Al Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, according to interviews with Kurdish intelligence officers, political analysts and members of the Nineveh provincial council based in Mosul.
During the meeting on the morning of June 5, the councilmen described the generals as imperious and dismissive. Gen Qanbar dismissed their objections to the military's heavy shelling of parts of the city that were under ISIL attack, said Mr Al Aqoub. Civilian casualties were mounting as a result.
"He just told us that in every war, there are civilian casualties," Mr Al Aqoub said, speaking at a hotel in the Kurdish-Iraqi capital of Erbil. "General Gheidan then nodded his head in agreement and said: 'In every war, there are always five per cent casualties'."
In a separate meeting with the generals later that day, Bashar Mahmoud, an ethnic Kurd who headed the 39-member provincial council, said the generals were confident that the militants would be repelled. But Gen Qanbar refused to discuss details.
"He told me not to worry, that he would sort the situation out," said Mr Mahmoud. "I felt surprised, but I was also alarmed.
"These people are not from Mosul and they didn't understand the city," he said.
By the time the meetings ended, the councilmen said they could hear explosions and gunfire in the city's July 17th area. The ISIL assault was fully under way, with several neighbourhoods falling to militants after what they said was a rapid build-up of their activity over the previous two days.
According to analysts, ISIL's blitzkrieg was carefully coordinated and planned long before then.
"[ISIL's] campaign of taking over Mosul has been ongoing and under way ... from October 2013, and throughout that period it has targeted security officials, journalists, local government officials, as well as neighbourhood government representatives known as mukhtars," said Ahmed Ali, senior Iraq analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
Still, there appeared to no shortage of soldiers and police officers in the Nineveh province and its capital Mosul in the run-up to the ISIL assault.
Khalaf Al Hadidi, a councilman in charge of strategic planning, said the province was defended by more than 60,000 soldiers, 25,000 officers from the local and federal police forces and thousands of security-intelligence agents.
The ISIL attack on Mosul was carried out with between 200 and 400 fighters, city leaders said.
Mr Al Hadidi said the military failed to respond to signs of the impending attack. He said in late May his bodyguard received a phone call from an informant working with fugitive former Baathist officers suspected of coordinating the ISIL attack from Syria.
The call warned that a convoy of 25 white Toyota pickup trucks had crossed the border from Syria to a militant stronghold about 100 kilometres west of Mosul.
"That information alarmed everyone," said Mr Al Hadidi, who reported it to the councilman in charge of security issues, Mohammed Ibrahim.
When vehicles of a similar make and colour were spotted entering the city on June 2, he said the council called for a meeting with Nineveh commander, Lt Gen Mahdi Al Gharrawi.
That meeting took place on June 4. While discussing the security situation, Lt Gen Gharrawi received a telephone call from one of his commanders about the military's seizure of 40 explosive devices in Mosul's July 17th neighbourhood.
"We realised something major was happening," said Mr Al Hadidi.
The following day the council met the two generals, and the military imposed a curfew between 7pm and 6am. The council decided to back the military operations, although its members held deep reservations over its tactics and said they were kept in the dark in terms of operations.
They could only watch on as militants captured that day the Ghazalani military base, a major weapons depot. Or when ISIL militants looted banks and started breaking into prisons and freeing hundreds of inmates as the city fell. Or when an armoured vehicle packed with explosives rammed on June 9 the Mosul International Hotel, which had been used as an impromptu security base.
"We were holding a council meeting when the truck exploded," said Mr Al Aqoub, the legislative committee head who felt the blast at the council's headquarters.
By 10pm that night, a colleague called the council's military head, Mr Ibrahim, for an update. "He said leave the city as quickly as you can."
"We didn't know whether the officers were still in charge, or whether they had left," said Mr Al Aqoub. After taking refuge at the fortified offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, he fled Mosul at 3am on June 10 to Tilkef, a village 10km north of the city under the control of Kurdish Peshmerga forces.
That also happened to be where Generals Qanbar and Gheidan had fled, along with scores of deserting soldiers who abandoned to the Peshmerga 20 US-made Humvee military vehicles, said Mr Mahmoud, the provincial council head who has a home in Tilkef.
"When they arrived in Tilkef, they went to the Peshmerga base. When I saw them there, there was a feeling of embarrassment," he said of the generals.
"They came up to me personally and said: 'We're sorry. There's nothing we can do'."
Generals Qanbar and Gheidan then left for Erbil's airport to return to Baghdad, Mr Mahmoud said.
The Nineveh commander Lt Gen Gharrawi, along with at least three other officers involved in the fighting, was dismissed by the prime minister on Tuesday for fleeing his post.
hnaylor@thenational.ae