WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is backtracking on the April-May timeframe a U.S. Central Command senior official gave to take back the northern Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State.
Concerns emerged, not only from the Iraqis but also the Kurdish Peshmerga, that the Iraqi army would simply not be ready soon enough.
Now Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby has said the effort to retake Mosul, a city of one and a half million people, will not happen until Iraqi forces are ready.
TRENDING: Jihad against Christians is due to … climate change?
As WND has reported, a Central Command, or Centcom, senior officer said the intent was to begin the assault before the Islamic holy period of Ramadan, which takes place in June, and the coming hot weather.
In a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon last week, the official said that up to 25,000 fighters formed by brigades of Iraqis along with Kurdish peshmerga forces and Sunni militia would seek to take back Iraq's second largest city from the Islamic State, which it has held since June 2014.
At the time, the briefing was given on condition that the official not be identified.
The disclosure prompted another intelligence source to tell WND that the disclosure was "pure lunacy."
Kirby, however, appeared to knock down the initial reports by the Centcom senior official and pointed out the secretary of Defense said there would be no retaking of Mosul until the Iraqi forces were ready, all but nixing out the short April-May timeframe.
"This Spring timeframe – I never pinned it down to a month, and Secretary [Ashton] Carter – again it has been consistent through the chain of command – not just here at the Pentagon but now in Tampa [Centcom headquarters] and out there in the [Iraqi] theatre that we're going to work with [the Iraqis] and make sure that they're ready on their timeline," Kirby said.
"Nothing has changed about that. I understand that through various press reporting there has been an appearance of pressure or maybe a difference in opinion of expectations," he said.
"We are not artificially trying to accelerate this timeline. With the exception of the Iraqis," Kirby said, "nobody has a greater stake in the ultimate success of operations inside Iraq, particularly in a place like Mosul than the Pentagon. So there is would be no logic or and no purpose for us to artificially accelerate things."
Concern was raised with Kirby at a Pentagon news conference in which this timeline was set out by Centcom even though Iraqi officials said its forces were not ready to take back Mosul in such a short time.
"I can't speak for the comments made by a briefer on a background briefing to reporters," Kirby said. "I need to put that aside. All I can do is keep coming back to where Secretary Carter is and certainly remains after his trip to the region and where I've been routinely for the last several months. We're not going to try to do this any faster than the Iraqis are ready to go."
Even the Iraqi Kurds were surprised by the Centcom announcement, prompting their representatives to the United States, Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, to warn that the Iraqi army would be ready.
He also expressed concern the Sunni tribes would not be united in fighting ISIS.
"Without the Sunni community in Mosul on our side," Rahman said, "how do we expect to take Mosul and then sustain that victory?
"From our point of view, we don't want a situation where Mosul is attacked and then you've got another humanitarian crisis with another flow of hundreds of thousands of people and they will come to Kurdistan," which is the Kurdish portion of northern Iraq.
The warning from the Kurds, who are a key U.S. partner, has prompted congressional criticism of President Barack Obama's strategy to defeat ISIS.
"We should very much be listening to their counsel, because they have been an effective fighting force on the ground, they understand fully the conditions there," Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told Al-Monitor.
Even Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., agreed that the Iraqis won't be ready by spring.
"I've heard that everywhere," McCain said. "That's why I was so astounded at the Centcom comment that they would be ready in a couple of months. Every estimate that I've heard is that it was far greater than that."