Iraqis slooow to take Mosul; How ISIS infiltrates Europe; Hijacker idiot, not terrorist; Slo-mo F-15 takeoff; and a bit more.

Surprise: Iraq’s military is having a bit of trouble with that Mosul offensive. They retreated while trying to clear villages on the approach to Iraq’s second-largest city, The Daily Beast reported from the village of Tel Reem, northwest of Mosul. In short, the problem is one of courage and morale, TDB writes after numerous interviews with Iraqi officials and Peshmerga fighters working with the Iraqi security forces near Mosul.

Said one Pesh fighter: “As you can see they have much better weapons and vehicles than us, at the current pace, I wonder how long it will take for them to take Mosul, if they cannot take even one village in two days.”

Implications for U.S. military: “The lack of morale among Iraqi soldiers indicates that maybe more U.S. boots on the ground are needed, or more support for the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, in order to make the Mosul operation more feasible. Another option would be involving the Iraqi Special Operation forces that played a major role in clearing out Ramadi.” Read the rest, here.

Relax, folks: The Pentagon’s proxy rebels are not fighting CIA-backed rebels in northwestern Syria, writes Sam Heller at War on the Rocks, pushing back on the weekend story from the Los Angeles Times. What’s really happening, Heller writes, is—of course—far more complicated. “The implication in the Los Angeles Times that the SDF drove west from northeastern Syria (east of the Euphrates) to the outskirts of Aleppo city is misleading... In reality, the Kurdish SDF actually pushed east from Afrin in the northwest, where they had been all along. SDF presence east of the Euphrates largely remains static, although they have established a beachhead west of the Tishrin Dam that spans the river. All this is relevant because the Pentagon has only supported the SDF east of the Euphrates in its battles with the Islamic State. The Afrin SDF is not Pentagon-backed — this sounds sort of ridiculous, but it’s true.”

If that’s too muddled, try this explanation from Sam: “To sum up: The non-Pentagon-backed SDF are fighting the CIA-backed northern Aleppo rebels, who are fighting alongside Pentagon-backed train-and-equip rebels against the Islamic State. The CIA-backed rebels are not fighting the Pentagon-backed SDF. They are fighting a different faction that does not enjoy U.S. support (and may have actually recently enjoyed Russian support). And the Pentagon-backed SDF is fighting the Islamic State in eastern Syria, half a country away.” Got it? Read the rest, here.

And-oh-by-the-way: Since re-opening its war on Kurdish separatists last July, Turkey says it has killed or captured more than 5,300 Kurds. That one, via the Associated Press, here.

It looks like Turkey’s president will get that meeting with President Obama after all. It’ll happen at this week’s nuclear summit in Washington, Reuters reported.

Apropos of nothing: Robots and 3-D models could help rebuild some of the historic city of Palmyra’s artifacts. NYTs has that bit of past-meets-future after the Syrian army recently took back the city from ISIS, here.  

ISIS sent enough affiliates to Europe to draw concern from officials as early 2014, “yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down,” NYT reports this morning.

Case in point: “One of the first clues that the Islamic State was getting into the business of international terrorism came at 12:10 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2014, when the Greek police pulled over a taxi in the town of Orestiada, less than four miles from the Turkish border. Inside was a 23-year-old French citizen named Ibrahim Boudina, who was returning from Syria. In his luggage, the officers found 1,500 euros, or almost $1,700, and a French document titled ‘How to Make Artisanal Bombs in the Name of Allah.’ But there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe, so the Greeks let him go, according to court records detailing the French investigation.”

Belgium wants U.S. help with its investigation into the Brussels attacks, The Wall Street Journal reports. “Belgians have shared copies of laptop hard drives and mobile phones that have been picked up in recent days with FBI investigators,” officials said.

Gloves slide under the microscope: “Belgian investigators are also trying to determine who might have left two right-handed gloves on a bus traveling from the Brussels airport after the attacks. Investigators want to know if the third man seen in the surveillance video tried to escape on the bus, leaving the gloves behind. Police dogs detected explosives on the gloves and investigators believe they were the partner gloves to the ones worn by the two suicide bombers who struck the Brussels airport. The two suicide bombers were dressed in black and each wore a single glove on their left hand.” More here.

Western Europe is no stranger to terrorism, as this chart from The Independent reveals in a report about how tragedies in Yemen and Baghdad take a back seat to international coverage of attacks in Western cities.

But: “He’s not a terrorist; he’s an idiot,” officials at Egypt’s ministry of foreign affairs said after an Egyptian man seized international headlines when he forced a passenger jet traveling from Alexandria to Cairo to land in Cyprus Tuesday morning after he claimed to have been wearing an explosives belt. The man reportedly said he was trying to get a letter to his ex-wife, which he chucked out the window of the plane once it landed on the Larnaca tarmac with more than 80 passengers and crew. The man is now in police custody and the passengers are safe.

From Defense One

Genocide, empty threats, and a warning to Obama, Clinton, and Trump. David Rohde watched America’s broken promise fuel Radovan Karadzic's terror in Bosnia. Via The Atlantic, here are some lessons for current and future presidents.

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking advice on building a master cyber-attack database. Officials admit there could be drawbacks to the idea, including a spike in the cost of insurance. NextGov reports, here.

Welcome to Tuesday’s D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. The last U.S. troops left Vietnam on this day in 1973; 39 years later, President Barack Obama declared it Vietnam Veterans Day. Subscribe to the D Brief: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.

A once-secret Pentagon office that gives the services money to try new ways of using weapons and sensors is turning to industry for help. Bloomberg reports: “It will be the Strategic Capabilities Office’s first major attempt to enlist industry input since it was set up in 2012 and then declassified in February by Defense Secretary Ash Carter.” The office, which is focusing on Asia-Pacific challenges these days, has in the past helped “the Army convert howitzers into potential antimissile systems, the Air Force with micro-drones that might be dispensed from F-16 fighters and the Navy with revamping Raytheon Co.’s SM-6 air defense missile into a ship-killer.” The SecDef must be pleased with its work; he has requested $902 million for the office for 2017, almost double this year’s allocation.

North Korea fired a rocket some 125 miles along its east coast early on Tuesday. AP reported that it appeared to be “another weapons test seen as a response to ongoing military drills between Washington and Seoul.” And recall that Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reported earlier this month that such tests were likely to be frequent until May, “when Pyongyang holds the 7th Worker’s Party Congress. It’s the first such event since 1980 and might be used to signal a new direction for the party.”

FBI broke into that iPhone at the center of a court battle over encryption. “The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on [terrorist Syed Rizwan] Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc.” prosecutors wrote in the Monday filing, Ars Technica reports. Will the feds tell Apple how they did it, and thereby help make our phones safer from hackers? Don’t hold your breath.

But one possibility, detailed by iOS security and forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski, is “a NAND mirroring attack” that copies data to allow unlimited passcode attempts. More on that, here.

There are just 12 U.S. bases remaining in Afghanistan, down from a peak of 715, Stars and Stripes writes after America’s Afghan reconstruction watchdog reported the value of property— “ranging from small, tactical combat outposts to large operational bases”—given to authorities in Kabul totals nearly $1 billion. “Of the 715 bases the U.S. operated over the course of the war, 391 were turned over to the government of Afghanistan, with the majority — 57 percent — going to the Afghan National Army, the report found. The Afghan National Police received 30 percent of the transferred bases, the second-largest share. Other bases were transferred to other components of the Defense Ministry and the Interior Ministry.”

And finally: watch those afterburners go! Some kind soul has uploaded slo-mo HD video footage of F-15E Strike Eagles taking off in dawn’s early light. Watch, here.