RAF Airstrikes Wait As Intelligence Is Key

As I write this, RAF Tornados have completed four armed missions over northern Iraq and are currently engaged in a fifth.

They have managed more than 12 hours of flying time in the theatre of operations since Friday's Parliamentary vote, hunting for Islamic State (IS) convoys, hideouts and strongholds. 

And yet, the Tornados haven't dropped a single bomb or fired a single missile. Should we be surprised? Not necessarily.

Privately I know military chiefs and senior politicians are slightly dismayed that the British haven't managed their first strikes on IS, but they acknowledge that it proves their pre-emptive warning that this will be a slow conflict with much patience required.

"Intelligence, intelligence, intelligence," is how analyst put it to me this morning. "That is the key to this battle, intelligence."

He is spot on.

The UK has its Rivet Joint aircraft flying out of Al-Udeid airbase in Qatar. It vacuums up communications data from 30-odd thousand feet. Telephone conversations, email traffic, text messages.

Tornado GR4 aircrew have completed four missions over Iraq. Pic MoD

The US has at least eight drones monitoring patterns of life. These can stay up in the air for many hours, watching a single spot if necessary.

IS have been smacked around a bit this past week and they're changing their tactics, minimising their exposure.

For all the technology in the sky, nothing beats eyes on the ground. Local knowledge.

The person who quietly points out the farmhouse down a track, an IS bomb-making factory. The source that passes on details of militants' movements. This is the aim: the local population working against the occupying insurgency.

But the local population needs to be convinced that the coalition, which they can barely see up in the skies above them, is the right side to be on.

They need to be sure the airstrikes will work. If they don't, the IS reprisals will be unforgiving.

Too many times, in this part of the world, has the West promised to defend the people only to leave them at the mercy of the enemy.

Peshmerga fighters have been unable to retake Mosul

In 1991, after American and British missiles pummelled Saddam's Iraq for weeks, President Bush encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow the government themselves.

Rise up they did, expecting the support of US fighter jets. Instead Iraqi helicopter gunships came for them. Some 60,000 Iraqis were killed; two million Kurds fled to Turkey and Iran.

Last year the United States, UK and France promised airstrikes against the Assad regime. They never came.

In the aftermath of that fateful vote in the House of Commons, we have talked much about the damage that night did to Washington-London relations. It was nothing compared to the loss of trust between anti-Assad forces and the West.

What will they now make of these airstrikes which, if anything, are helping Assad?

We mock the abject failure of the Iraqi army to protect its country against the march of ISIS, but in truth they were never going to succeed. They just weren't welcome in many of the towns and cities they sought to defend.

The widespread Sunni hatred of the Maliki government kept them out.

They were weak - yes, too weak for an army that has received billions of dollars in equipment and training from Washington. Their capitulation was a failure of politics as much as it was one of military.

My colleague Stuart Ramsay writes today about the Peshmerga's inability to re-take Mosul, despite their will to do so.

The truth is that at the moment there is a dramatic mis-match between the modern warplanes dropping precision missiles and the poorly armed, inadequate armies on the ground.

The two need to work together, if this is going to work at all. 

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