Mosul Iraq.

This is coolbert:

Stalingrad deja vu all over again 2017?

The operation to liberate Mosul Iraq from ISIL control stalls and big time. 

From the latest edition of the DEBKAfile news letter and copied unashamedly so to a large degree in entirety what I have feared has come to pass and big time it appears.

"Propping up US-Iraqi Mosul flop exposed Baghdad"

31 December.

"US and Iraqi military reinforcements were rushed this week to the crumbling Mosul front line to prop up the few positions still held by the Iraqi army and prevent the US-backed offensive from crashing into defeat at ISIS hands. The Islamists took advantage of the transfer of Iraqi troops to Mosul for their first major terrorist attack in central Mosul in three months, killing 28 people and injuring 40, as well as declaring war on Jordan. The US-backed Iraqi campaign launched in October to liberate Mosul from the clutches of the Islamic State is on its last legs, although the Obama administration and Iraqi Prime Minister Haydar al-Abadi are making every effort to disguise the debacle . . . the Iraqi army's Mosul operation has run aground, despite solid US military backing, giving the advantage to Islamic State fighters occupying Iraq's biggest city since the summer of 2015."

"The jihadists staunched the Iraqi army's advance by releasing in its path hundreds of suicide killers in waves on foot and in bomb cars. This tactic has inflicted crippling losses on the two elite Iraqi divisions leading the offensive, the Golden Division, which is the backbone of Iraq's Special Operations forces, and the 9th Armored Division. Devastating losses forced both to pull back from the battlefield."

See previous blog entries that topic of which was the Mosul operation and the apparent lack of progress thereof::

http://militaryanalysis.blogspot.com/2016/12/palmyramosul.html

http://militaryanalysis.blogspot.com/2016/12/no-go.html

http://militaryanalysis.blogspot.com/2016/11/body-count.html

coolbert.