"It is not going to be this climactic battle ... It's going to be probably a slow process," said Maj. Gen. Mark P. Hertling, commander of U.S. forces in northern Iraq.
In a telephone interview from his headquarters in Tikrit, Hertling described the strategy for Mosul — Iraq's third-largest city — as the same step-by-step tactics used in the U.S.-led troop offensives in Baghdad: win control of a district and keep troops there to hold it.
Hertling said he was moving a considerable force of "enablers" into the Nineveh province and Mosul, its capital. He would not disclose numbers, but said the move on Mosul had long been planned.
But attention on Mosul has sharply increased in the past weeks with a rise in insurgent violence, including a bomb cache that tore through a poor Sunni neighborhood, killing about 60 people and wounding more than 200 last week. Then on Monday, U.S. forces were caught in a bomb-and-bullets ambush that killed five U.S. soldiers.
Al-Maliki has promised to send a wave of Iraq police and soldiers into the Mosul area to crush al-Qaida and its backers.
The offensive raised the possibility that Iraqi forces were moving toward a critical test by leading the difficult urban offensive in a city of 2 million people. Hertling's comments, however, suggested a heightened level of U.S. involvement and oversight.
Obviously, we are going to help the Iraqis. Virtually any of our allies would require our help in similar circumstances.
But this is clearly a test of how the Iraqis can move against the weakened jihadis with our forces in support.
This article is amazingly unhelpful and appears, as of late Tuesday, to be a placeholder article only. But it does indicate that the surge does not have to draw down completely if victory requires more than 15 brigades in Iraq.
