Geography And Strategy

With increases in pressure being placed on the insurgency that's been migrating out of Baghdad, we're going to start seeing a slow migration of ISF out of Baghdad and into northern provinces like Diyala, Salah ad Din, and Nineveh. And while that is planned for the future, US diplomats are engaging Iran in more talks on Iraqi stability and security. While it may be somewhat difficult to see the strategic ramifications of this, fortunately someone knows enough to draw a map of the place.

Traveling through al-Anbar with any degree of speed means traveling on a highway that runs through both Ramadi and Fallujah, neither of which are good bets for an insurgent at this point (ask Michael Totten). The other major highway that would work runs from Mosul in Nineveh province to Baghdad through Salah ad-Din, which explains in part why the province has had a fairly steady casualty count over the past 6 months; insurgents are coming in fresh from Mosul, and falling back from Baghdad at the same time. This explains the strategic importance of heavier ISF presence in Mosul - control the city and earn the support of the population, and you control a major point of ingress for foreign fighters.

Diyala province is a different story, but no less important. The influx of Iranian weapons is fairly widely accepted at this point, and the fastest way to Baghdad from Iran is through Diyala. Now, add this to what we know about Diyala (ABC article):

"Al-Qaida began moving into Diyala in 2006 after losing its sanctuaries in Anbar Province and declared Baqouba as the capital of the Islamic State of Iraq."

AQI ran to many places when they lost Anbar, but Baqoubah was a big one, which explains why they're gathering there now: easier access to Iranian weapons, a former Islamic State capitol to defend (read: "lose yet again"), the increasingly hopeless odds for a successful insurgency in Baghdad, and the fastest possible way out of the country should they be pushed back further to Muqdadiyah, a town that quite recently saw this theory made real in the form of a pair of suicide bombers.

So where is the strategy going to go?

The Iraqis are planning a crackdown in Diyala province to stomp out the fleeing insurgency, and US officials are going to be engaging Iran in talks about Iraq's stability and security, a measure obviously directed towards Diyala province and other border provinces. Planned for Mosul is the possible influx of 1,400 Iraqi troops to enhance security presence and make it harder for insurgents to move.

Pushing insurgents into smaller and smaller cities both limits their movement and decreases their popular support. One of the reasons why the Anbar Awakening was so successful is that in small towns where the Awakening took hold, most people knew each other, and knew who the outsiders were. As insurgents are pushed into smaller towns by increased operational tempo on part of the Americans and the ISF, they'll find less and less shelter amongst the population until they're forced to live outside of it, or leave the country completely.

When Robert Gates, General Petraeus, and Lieutenant General Odierno say that there's more security work to be done, this is exactly the work that they're talking about.