Coalition set to attack Isil’s capital Raqqa ‘within weeks’

“We’ve planned for that, and we have the resources for both”, Carter told NBC News early Wednesday, saying an attack on Raqqa would commence “in the next few weeks“.

“We know they’re up to something”, the general said, speaking from Baghdad.

Carter notes that the 5600 USA troops in Iraq won’t take part in the “occupation” of Mosul (a poorly chosen word, considering that the Iraqis will be establishing their own legitimate sovereignty there), presumably freeing us up to assist in an assault on Raqqa.

Army Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend also said American intelligence has detected indistinct signs of Islamic State plotting against the West from Raqqa, adding urgency to coalition plans to encircle and eventually assault the city.

Lt Gen Townsend refused to go into detail about the threat, but said there were signs of plots against the US, France and other European Union countries.

“They’re pulling out all stops”, he said, adding that he expects IS forces to mount a similar defense of Raqqa.

The spike in US -led airstrikes supporting the Mosul operation means there will be fewer airstrikes in Syria because the Iraqi-led Mosul operation is the “main effort”, Townsend said. So, we’re gonna take the force that we have and it will – we will go to Raqqa soon with that force.

Despite these threats, Townsend said there was no plan to accelerate the timeline to retake Raqqa from ISIS.

The operation to retake Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, is expected to take weeks, if not months. U.S. officials told the Wall Street Journal that the force to take Raqqa must be primarily Arab, with Kurds used merely to “shape” the operation at the outset.

‘Turkey will not allow Sinjar to be the new Qandil for PKK terrorists’President Erdoğan also said that Turkey would not allow the town of Sinjar, part of Nineveh province in northern Iraq, to be the new Qandil for the PKK terrorist organization, and that Turkey would not allow a PKK presence in the northern Iraqi region of Sinjar. The Islamic State has made Raqqa the capital of their territory in Syria, committing atrocities against the civilian population.

“We think we’ve got to get to Raqqa pretty soon”.

The impending operation is further complicated, some independent experts say, because neither the Turks nor the Syrian Kurds view the recapture of Raqqa as one of their top priorities – unlike Washington. “We haven’t reached that stage of the planning with them yet”, he said.

Though the Syrian city is much smaller than Mosul, the fight will present different challenges to military operations.

The senior military official said that if the Mosul and Raqqa operations were launched simultaneously, the biggest strains would be on fighter jets and reconnaissance aircraft.

As Ed Morrissey writes, “If ISIS believes that the coalition has enough resources for a siege and ground assault on ISIS” last remaining significant city, they might be tempted to pull out of Mosul and dare the US and its allies to try.

There would be no such invitation in Syria – the countries taking part in the anti-IS coalition are opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and want to avoid operations that would help him.

The US-led coalition against IS is likely to provide air support but Turkey opposes the involvement of any Syrian Kurdish militias.

The United Nations reported on Tuesday that the extremist group had recently executed dozens of civilians and taken more than 500 families from surrounding villages into Mosul to use as human shields.