ISIS Is on Its Heels, but Fighting to the Death
ABOARD THE U.S.S. NIMITZ, in the Persian Gulf — A few days ago, Capt. Mike Spencer of the Marines rocketed off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in his F-18 to provide air support for Iraqi troops advancing on the dusty city of Tal Afar, one of the Islamic State’s last strongholds.
A busy six hours followed in the skies over Iraq. As Islamic State fighters fired on Iraqi forces from a building, Captain Spencer dropped precision-guided munitions on them, destroying the structure and presumably killing the men inside. A short while later, he was ordered to take out another Islamic State fighting position nearby. He did so, and then eliminated another.When he ran out of bombs, Captain Spencer headed back to the Nimitz.
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The Risk board that is the map of Iraq may show almost certain defeat for the Islamic State as its territory continues to shrink, but American officials say the pace of the fight is not slowing. The aircraft carrier Nimitz, where Captain Spencer commands a Marine squadron, is launching as many sorties and strikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq and Syria as other American aircraft carriers were doing three years ago, after President Barack Obama opened the bombing campaign.
The militants have lost a long list of cities and towns in Iraq — Baquba, Abu Ghraib, Falluja, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul and, now, Tal Afar, which the Iraqi prime minister declared liberated on Thursday — and are under attack from all sides in a desperate fight over Raqqa, their self-proclaimed capital in Syria. But one would never know it from the way the extremists have continued to fight, American soldiers and Marines say.
“We definitely have the offensive,” Captain Spencer said. But, he added, “they have resigned themselves that they’re going to fight to the bitter end, and they are going to take as many of us with them as possible.”
From Raqqa to Mosul to Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan, the presumed victors in the war against the Islamic State paint a picture of an insurgency that has not yet seemed to realize that it is on its heels. The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, on Thursday cast the fight in stark terms. “Wherever you are, we are coming for liberation, and you have no option but to surrender or die,” he said.
While small numbers of fighters are surrendering, with some fleeing to Turkey, many more are dying. Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, the American commander of the war effort against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that the final days of combat this summer in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, resembled the worst fighting he had witnessed “in 35 years.”
“They’re fighting like a conventional army fights,” said Maj. Jarrod A. Devore, another Marine fighter pilot stationed on the Nimitz.
He and other pilots said that the Islamic State fighters were behaving far differently than the Qaeda or Taliban fighters of recent insurgencies. Islamic State fighters, they say, are far slower to abandon entrenched fighting positions. They stay in the territory they have taken until they are, literally, blown out.
In a reflection of that tenacity, some Islamic State fighters in Mosul who refused to surrender were buried under rubble by Iraqi security forces in bulldozers, General Townsend said.
Once American-backed troops move on, the militants often return, no matter how intense the bombing campaign had been. The case of what is known as the Mother of All Bombs illustrates the militants’ determination.
On April 13, Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the American commander of the war effort in Afghanistan, ordered forces to drop the huge weapon, the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal, on an Islamic State cave complex in the Achin district of Nangarhar, a remote area of eastern Afghanistan. The weapon is so large that it had to be dropped from the back of a cargo plane — a regular bomber or fighter could not handle it.
The strike was the first combat use of what is formally named the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast. It remains unclear how many Islamic State fighters were killed in the bombing, but Afghan soldiers of the 201st Corps, stationed nearby at Tactical Base Gamberi, celebrated the bombing and asked American troops stationed with them why the United States could not drop more such bombs.
The local Afghan troops did not want to take on the fierce Islamic State fighters themselves, American advisers at Gamberi said. In March, the 201st Corps had lost some 16 men in one night in a fight against the Islamic State. “They did not have the appetite to go into southern Nangarhar and fight Daesh,” said Maj. Richard Anderson, an American operations adviser to the 201st Corps, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
The Afghan soldiers’ happiness at the dropping of the bomb soon changed to annoyance when the American advisers told them that they would have to go into the province and “hold” areas to prevent Islamic State fighters from coming back. At first, the Afghans balked.
“We kept telling them, there is no U.S. ‘hold,’” Major Anderson said in an Aug. 21 interview at Gamberi. “They didn’t understand that. They said: ‘You dropped the MOAB. Why don’t you just drop another MOAB?’”
Eventually, the Afghan soldiers deployed into some of the areas in Nangarhar Province that had been cleared by American and Afghan Special Operations forces.
The fighting is still intense. The tunnel complex where the giant bomb was dropped has not remained clear of Islamic State fighters. While the bomb did initially clear the area of Islamic State fighters, many have returned.
“They’re already proving that they’re willing to go back into the area where the MOAB dropped,” Major Anderson said. “They’re there today.”
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