Lessons, 10 years after ISIS took over Mosul - analysis

This week marks the tenth anniversary of Mosul being taken over by ISIS, the Islamic extremist group that swept into the large Iraqi city and took it over on June 10, 2014.

The conquest of Mosul followed the dramatic rise of ISIS just a few months earlier. The group had its roots in extremists in Iraq and Syria who had grown out of Sunni insurgent groups that were fighting the US, boosted by the chaos of the Syrian civil war.

ISIS was able to build upon the framework that existed in Iraq and Syria to make itself into a war machine.

This was not just a terrorist group or a bunch of terrorist cells like al-Qaeda. It wasn’t an insurgency, either. ISIS thrived because of the states’ breakdown in Syria and Iraq.

In Syria, the civil war had been growing since 2011. Syria truly began to break apart in 2012 and 2013, with many local groups assuming control of certain areas. The Syrian regime likely had an interest in fueling the disintegration and factionalism within the rebel groups by encouraging extremists to grow.

It’s important to understand that the Syrian regime had long tolerated extremists such as jihadist types who flowed into Iraq via the Euphrates River Valley, during the period of the US conquest of Iraq after 2003.

When America left Iraq in 2011, these groups were able to consolidate their influence in marginal desert regions. The era of the Sunni “awakening” in Iraq had been pushed aside by the authoritarian Shi’ite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. This created a toxic vacuum in Syria and Iraq in 2013 and 2014 because both regimes were letting groups seep into the periphery.

ISIS burst onto the scene due to its brutality and zealous cohesion. It promised a new Islamic era, free from the infighting of Syrian rebel groups and from what many Sunnis in Iraq saw as oppression by the Iranian-backed Maliki regime. ISIS also benefited from the fact that Kurdish groups were creating a form of autonomy in eastern Syria, and the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq had no love for Maliki either.

ISIS entered a vacuum

ISIS moved into the vacuum that was created in June 2014. Mosul was a logical objective. A city of two million, it sits on two banks of the Tigris River. The western half of the city is anchored in the historic old city of Mosul. The eastern half is more modern and has larger boulevards built during Saddam Hussein’s era.

Mosul was a city that deeply supported Saddam’s regime and Moslawis (the people of Mosul) were known to flock to Saddam’s army during the 1980s and the war against Iran.

Thus, it was no surprise that the city might fall to ISIS; it had a large number of veterans with military training who looked fondly on the old era. ISIS promised them a new era, only one that bowed before the black Islamic flag.

ISIS MAY HAVE promised something to locals in Syria and Iraq, but its policies were genocidal when it came to minorities. It was foremost a group that wanted to ethnically cleanse and massacre Shi’ites, Christians, and other minorities such as the Yazidis. ISIS set its plans into motion much like the Nazi regime in the 1930s, legislating the expulsion and mass murder first of one group, then the other, and so on.

 It expelled Christians from Mosul and the Nineveh Plains. It rounded up Shi’ite cadets at Camp Speicher and murdered over a thousand of them on June 12, 2014. It’s worth recalling that this mass murder of Shi’ites is similar in number to what Hamas did on October 7.

However, ISIS was not done with its horrific crimes. When it saw that it faced almost no opposition in Iraq, it decided to massacre and enslave the Yazidis, a minority group who lived in northern Iraq. In August 2014, ISIS actualized its ideology by overrunning numerous Yazidi villages, forcing half a million people to flee, and capturing thousands more.

ISIS then divided the men and women, murdering many of the older people and selling the women, children, and some of the men into slavery. Thousands of women were sold in markets in Mosul, northern Iraq, and the ISIS capital in Syria. They were sold to be enslaved and raped.

Significantly, ISIS used the same term for the women that it was selling as Hamas used when defining the women that it had captured on October 7. The term sabaya means female slave. Western progressives and pro-Hamas voices deny this, but the facts are clear. ISIS was a movement devoted to mass rape and genocide. Hamas bears similarities to ISIS both in method and in mentality.

THE CITY OF Mosul was devastated by ISIS’s occupation. More than half its residents had to flee the extremists. The brutal, genocidal terrorist group occupied Mosul from June 2014 to June 2017, when the Iraqi army, backed by the US-led coalition against ISIS, defeated it in Mosul, a campaign that began in October 2016.

I witnessed many of the crimes of ISIS. I saw the mass graves of the Yazidis in northern Iraq after they were uncovered in the fall of 2015. These killing fields were similar to what the Nazis had done in Eastern Europe under the Einsatzgruppen.

ISIS lined up the Yazidis and shot them, pushing their bodies into mass graves. Dozens of these graves were found. The same fate awaited Bedouin tribes who did not accept ISIS rule, Christians, Shi’ites, and any other group or local dissidents.

Defeating ISIS took years. However, Iraq was able to mobilize against the extremists. The Kurdish Peshmerga pushed ISIS back from Mosul and Sinjar. Other Kurdish groups linked to the YPG in Syria helped liberate parts of Mosul and save hundreds of thousands of Yazidis. In central Iraq, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani put out a fatwa that called to arms young men. These men flocked to the banners of various militias to fight ISIS. By 2016, the Iraqi army, supported by the seventy countries who backed the US-led coalition, was able to help Iraq prepare to retake Mosul.

Mosul has now recovered over the last seven years since it was liberated. Churches have been revived. But the scars will not all heal. The Christian community barely exists there today. Yazidis have not received support to rebuild Sinjar. The Kurdish community sought more freedom and independence in 2017 only to be attacked by the Iraqi federal government backed by Shi’ite militias. Iran has decided to use the militias to attack US forces and also threaten Israel. As such, Iraq has not had peace since the defeat of ISIS.

The ISIS conquest of Mosul shook the region from its slumber. Its crimes were so shocking that many countries decided to confront this extremism. That had a profound effect on the Gulf States and Jordan. It also hardened the Syrian regime and led some Lebanese to believe that Hezbollah was necessary to defend Lebanon from groups like ISIS.

ISIS’s crimes and its methods were also what likely inspired Hamas. ISIS used tunnels and drones; it adapted to its environment. It also learned how to operate against the sophisticated US technology that empowers drones and other assets in the region.

As such, Hamas was likely inspired by ISIS’s crimes, believing that it could one day do the same. Tragically for Israel, Hamas was able to do what ISIS did, and Jews on the border on October 7 found themselves as vulnerable as Christians, Yazidis, and Shi’ites in Iraq.