Former Fort Bliss commander Pittard on what’s changed with ISIS since summer, what’s next
Maj. Gen. Dana Pittard, former commanding general of Fort Bliss and the 1 st Armored Division, recently talked with NPR about the fight against ISIS and the support ISIS is losing. Here is part of the piece.
In the heat of summer in 2014, Baghdad was spooked.
A third of Iraq was under the control of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS. The extremist group thrived in the chaos of the Syrian civil war, then surged over the border into Iraq and took over the cities of Mosul and Tikrit. People worried the capital might be next.
Six months on, that’s changed. On New Year’s Eve, for instance, the usual midnight curfew was lifted and people partied in the streets and uploaded videos of themselves letting off fireworks.
Baghdadis say that change is because they feel the pushback against ISIS has begun in earnest.
U.S. commanders say they’re debating hard with Iraqi counterparts about when to push ground troops into the ISIS-occupied areas — maybe the spring.
Pittard thinks the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the most populous ISIS-controlled city, should be taken back fast.Pittard led the Joint Operations Center in Baghdad from late June until late October. Pittard isdeputy commander for the Third U.S. Army in Kuwait.
“We’re just getting indications of morale problems,” Pittard says. “And with the people that are in Mosul and seeing [ISIS], they say it’s not more than a thousand there now; certainly no more than 2,000.”
Pittard also says the extremists are losing local support because the people in Mosul are finding that ISIS does not govern very well. Analysts reckon the group’s cachet depends on its being able to govern. But Pittard says in Mosul, Iraqi Kurdish soldiers have cut off ISIS’ crucial supply lines so they can’t provide fuel and clean water.
“They are clearly on the defensive, except a couple [of] tactical ambushes and a couple of small tactical counterattacks,” he says, “but other than that, it’s not like what we saw in June at all.”
The extremists themselves constantly issue propaganda with ambitious plans for expansion and global attacks. As the international efforts to stop them get more organized, that’s looking more farfetched. However, Iraqi analyst Hashemi says that doesn’t mean they can’t cause harm.
“They have more than 20,000 fighters in Iraq directly engaged in warfare and more than 40,000 fighters in sleeper cells,” Hashemi says.
Under pressure, Hashemi thinks the group could go back underground, focusing on insurgent tactics like bombings. Meanwhile, in Syria, U.S.-led training of ground forces to fight ISIS is much slower, and complicated by the messy civil war there.
The group is likely to be weakened in 2015, but no one is betting on them being defeated entirely.
Read the full NPR article or listen to it at http://n.pr/1Chr7aX
More on Pittard
Pittard led the Joint Operations Center in Baghdad from late June until late October before returning to his position ofdeputy commander for the Third U.S. Army in Kuwait.
Past pieces on him give a glimpse into his leadership style.
Pittard spoke about leadership and the importance of coalitions during aspeechto Middle East students in Dec. 2013.
Pittard, a native of El Paso and graduate of Eastwood High School, was commanding general of Fort Bliss starting in 2010 and 1 st Armored Division in May starting in 2011. He relinquished both positions in May 2013.
He then became the deputy commander for the Third U.S. Army in Kuwait, where his duties included overseeing the American military operation in Jordan.
Pittard and President Barack Obama have met on at least a couple of occasions when the president visited Fort Bliss in 2010 and 2012. Obama visited the post in Aug. 2010, the same day he announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq.
