Isolation of Mosul

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Well, it looks like Mosul is isolated, sort of: mosul-iraq-advance

The Shiite militia have cut the main road to the west of Mosul. As no one wants the Shiite militia to go into the city, this is a good use for them. Also the Turks don’t want them to advance on the Turkmen town of Tal Afar. Not sure who is supposed to take it, but it appears that Mosul is not yet completely isolated. But, I suspect that anyone ISIL wanted to stay are still in Mosul and anyone they wanted to leave has left.

Are there 5,000 ISIL fighters in Mosul? I doubt that. I suspect there is a holding force of hundreds and probably no more than a thousand. If they left more than that behind, then it is just a gift for the Iraqi Army, for the insurgents are nicely gathered together ready to be killed. They are a bigger problem is they go back to being guerillas, which is what I assume most of them are doing.

The Iraqi army has not yet entered the city. The front line in the east is just 200 meters from Mosul (two Canadian football fields away).

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Christopher A. Lawrence
Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.

Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.

His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) and The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019)

Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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