There's no question Baghdad needs to take back Mosul from ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. It could not do it before. In theory, the time is now.
The real question is the conflicting motivations of the large "who's who" doing it; the Iraqi Army's 9
th Division; the Kurdish Peshmerga, under the baton of wily, corrupt opportunist Barzani; Sunni tribal lords; tens of thousands of Shi'ite militias from southern Iraq; operational "support" from US Special Forces; "targeted" bombing by the US Air Force; and lurking in the background, Turkish Special Forces and air power.
Now that's a certified recipe for trouble.
Much like Aleppo, Mosul is - literally -
the stuff of legend. The successor of ancient Nineveh, settled 8000 years ago; former capital of the Assyrian Empire under
Sennacherib in the 7
th century B.C.; conquered by Babylon in the 6
th century B.C.; a thousand years later, annexed to the Muslim empire and ruled by the Umayyads and the Abbasids; the key hub, from the 11
th to the 12
th century, of the Atabegs medieval state; a key Ottoman hub in a 16
th century post-Silk Road spanning the Indian Ocean all the way to the Persian Gulf, the Tigris valley, Aleppo and Tripoli in the Mediterranean.
After WWI, everyone craved Mosul - from Turkey to France. But it was the Brits who managed to dupe France into letting Mosul be annexed to the British Empire's brand new colony: Iraq. Then came the long Arab nationalist Ba'ath party domination. And afterwards, Shock and Awe and hell; the US invasion and occupation; the tumultuous Shi'ite-majority government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad; and the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh takeover in the summer of 2014.
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