#raqqa

🇬🇧: I drew Rakka from Haibane Renmei

by Oved Lobel

In Iraq, the combination of militias and security forces that liberated Mosul from IS, backed by US and allied airpower and artillery, were fighting to take back their own city, with a population almost entirely hostile to IS. They had around a year to plan the operation, had all the initiative and were under no domestic or international political or time constraints to complete the operation within a given period. Moreover, the Iraqi security forces lost more than 1,200 men in the battle, and perhaps more than 8,000.

Israel, by contrast, had approximately a week to plan an incredibly complex operation, having been caught entirely off-guard by the Hamas invasion on October 7. The IDF is fighting to remove a terrorist regime from territory Israel does not control and where the population is almost entirely hostile to Israel and supportive of Hamas.

In addition, Israel cannot afford an operation that lasts as long as the battle for Mosul did, nor can it afford the number of casualties sustained by Iraqi security forces around Mosul or US partner forces in Raqqa. The reason for this is simple: because of Israel’s conscript and reservist system, its soldiers are drawn from its workforce. On top of that, there is an insurmountable political and social imperative in Israeli society to preserve the lives of soldiers insofar as possible.

Internationally, meanwhile, pressure on Israel to either finish the war as quickly as possible or simply halt it entirely, regardless of the outcome, has been building since even before Israel launched its ground operation.

There are also substantive differences, both tactically and numerically, between Hamas and IS, including the reality that Hamas had 16 years to build up its much more impressive and embedded military infrastructure in civilian areas.

Finally, a key difference between the battlefields, one of many, is that the US and its partners on the ground were able to facilitate the evacuation of civilians from both Raqqa and Mosul before and during the battles, leaving far smaller civilian populations trapped in the cities while also reducing the battlespace by allowing IS operatives to leave the cities. IS eventually melted away and transitioned back into an insurgency.

In Gaza, where Hamas utilises every inch to attack Israel and is unwilling and unable to leave the battlefield like IS did, it is unfortunately impossible for civilians to flee to fully safe areas. They cannot exit into the Sinai both because Egypt will not allow it and because the international community has decided that temporarily displacing Palestinian civilians out of Gaza is worse than keeping them as human shields for Hamas.

“We were like the living dead,” said the women of Raqqa while talking about the period when Raqqa was controlled by ISIS, adding, “The liberation of Raqqa was like a rebirth for us.”

Members of the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) arrive on the front lines in the eastern outskirts of Raqqa on July 18, 2017.