The top American general in the Middle East said Tuesday that the Iraqi military is on track to objective to launch an operation to retake Mosul by the end of the year.
At a Pentagon briefing, Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. Central Command, said that the training of Iraqi forces is on track to realize Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi's timeline of launching an operation to retake Mosul by the end of this year.
"My assessment is in over the course of my visits I think is that they are on track to achieve that objective," said Votel. "They own the timeline here for this, and so we'll continue to work very, very closely with them and insure that we can support their operations where they're ready to go. But I think we are proceeding apace exactly where we hope to be at this particular time."
Votel believes ISIS could employ different strategies to defend the city when Iraqi forces eventually launch an offensive to retake it. He thinks ISIS may cede some parts of the city willingly, as it has done most recently in Jarabulus, and put up stiff resistance in other parts of the city, as it did in the battles for Manbij and Ramadi.
An Iraqi offensive on Mosul would be the culmination of a two-year Iraqi military campaign to remove the ISIS military threat from northern Iraq.
Much of the U.S. military presence in Iraq has been geared toward training and advising Iraq’s security forces to defeat ISIS militarily and take back the cities controlled by ISIS, particularly Mosul.
ABC News takes a look at why Mosul is so important in the fight against ISIS.
Located along the banks of the Tigris River in northern Iraq's Nineveh Province, Mosul is Iraq's second largest city with a population of more than 2 million residents. The population represents a mix of the diverse ethnic groups in northern Iraq, though the majority are Sunni Arabs and Kurds.
Mosul is the main industrial city in northern Iraq and a vital transportation hub in the flow of goods to and from Turkey and Syria. It is also located near significant oil fields in northern Iraq and the major oil pipeline into Turkey.
ISIS surprisingly seized Mosul in June 2014 in a matter of days after the retreat of a large number of Iraqi security forces from the city. American officials have blamed that retreat on the Sunni Arab soldiers and police based in the city who abandoned their posts after growing disenchanted with the increasing sectarianism of the Shiite-led government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
The city's capture left ISIS with large numbers of Iraqi military equipment and supplies that it quickly used to push toward the Iraqi capital of Baghdad 250 miles to the south. ISIS also seized an estimated $500 million in cash taken from the Central Bank of Mosul that is has used to fund its military and terror operations.
ISIS’s seizure of Mosul was a blow to Iraq’s political stability and a propaganda coup for a terror group that wanted to demonstrate it was gaining territory to establish a new caliphate.
A successful offensive on Mosul will take away from ISIS its last strategic stronghold in Iraq and end the territorial dominance it commanded over large areas of northwestern Iraq for the past two years.
The group’s control of territory there was made easier by the flow of ISIS fighters from its de facto capital of Raqqah in north central Syria. An ISIS defeat in Mosul would cut off that route and leave the terror group’s military operations effectively contained to Syria.
For more than two years, the Iraqi military offensive on Mosul has been expected to be the most important battle against ISIS.
Much of the training of Iraqi and Kurdish security forces by American and coalition trainers has effectively been directed at generating the more than 25,000 troops believed needed for an offensive on Mosul.
From early on, American military officials have telegraphed that the city would be enveloped from the north and south by as many as eight Iraqi Army brigades.
The expectation has always been that ISIS would mount a stiff defense to hold the city with the possibility of fierce street-to-street fighting on a grand scale.
If Iraqi forces successfully retake the city, plans call for Iraqi police to quickly step in to help establish order.
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