How to Win Mosul Without Losing Iraq

Few doubt that the offensive now underway in Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, will end Islamic State’s barbaric two-year rule there. The question is how to manage the aftermath so it doesn't plunge Iraq back into civil war.

You almost need a scorecard to keep track of all the players in the effort to liberate the ethnically diverse metropolis: the Iraqi army; Iran-backed Shiite militias; a 10,000-man Sunni “tribal force”; various Kurdish peshmerga forces; Turkmen, Yazidi, Chaldean and Assyrian Christian resistance groups; and several hundred American special forces backed by U.S. air power. They are all arrayed against just 5,000 or so Islamic State fighters.