Saturday 27 / April / 2024
Bashiqa (Iraq): Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces stormed an IS-held town northeast of Mosul on Monday, trying to clear a pocket of militants outside the city while Iraqi troops wage a fierce urban war with the militants in its eastern neighbourhoods.
The Iraqi operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and militias, backed by US-led air strikes and a global consensus against the militants, has so far gained just a small foothold in Mosul.
In Bashiqa, some 15km (10 miles) from Mosul, the first waves of a 2,000-strong peshmerga force entered the town on foot and in armoured vehicles or Humvees.
Artillery earlier pounded the town, which lies on the Nineveh plains at the foot of a mountain.
"Our aim is to take control and clear out all the Daesh (IS) militants," Lieutenant-Colonel Safeen Rasoul told Reuters. "Our estimates are there are about 100 still left and 10 suicide cars."
IS fighters have sought to slow the offensive on their Mosul stronghold with waves of suicide car bomb attacks. Iraqi commanders say there have been 100 on the eastern front and 140 in the south.
A top Kurdish official told Reuters on Sunday the militants had also deployed drones strapped with explosives, long-range artillery shells filled with chlorine gas and mustard gas and trained snipers.
As a peshmerga column moved into Bashiqa on Monday, a loud explosion rocked the convoy, and two large plumes of white smoke could be seen just 50 feet (15 metres) away. A peshmerga officer said two suicide car bombs had tried to hit the advancing force.
"They are surrounded... If they want to surrender, OK. If they don't, they will be killed," said Lieutenant-Colonel Qandeel Mahmoud, standing next to a Humvee, supported by a cane he said he has needed since he was wounded in the leg by two suicide car bombers four months ago.
Armed US soldiers, part of a 5,000 strong force Washington says is advising and supporting the Iraqi offensive, were accompanying the peshmerga in Bashiqa through streets lined by rows of damaged houses, some with entire floors collapsed.
Fighting was intense and at one stage a convoy of 40 vehicles was held up by a single IS sniper.
In eastern districts of Mosul, which Iraqi special forces broke into last week, officers say militants melted into the population, ambushing and isolating troops in what the special forces spokesman called the world's "toughest urban warfare".
Mosul has been held by the group since its fighters drove the army out of northern Iraq in June 2014. The campaign to retake it is the most complex military operation in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein.
IS leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, whose whereabouts are unknown but who is believed to be in northern Iraq close to the Syrian border, has told his followers there can be no retreat in a "total war" with their enemies.
The militants in Mosul have been waging a fierce and brutal defence, although they have lost ground on all fronts outside the city itself.
To the south of Mosul, security forces said they had recaptured and secured the town of Hammam Al Alil from IS fighters, who they said had kept thousands of residents as human shields as well as marching many others alongside retreating militants towards Mosul as cover from air strikes.
The United Nations has warned of a possible exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees from a city which is still home to up to 1.5 million people. So far 34,000 have been displaced, the International Organization for Migration said.
Many of those still in Mosul feel trapped, including those in districts which the army entered last week.
"We still can't go out of our houses.... mortars are falling continuously on the quarter," a resident of the Quds neighbourhood on the eastern edge of the city told Reuters by telephone on Sunday.
Security forces on the southern front have continued their advance, reaching within 4 km (2-1/2 miles) of Mosul's airport, on the southern edge of the city and on the western bank of the Tigris River which runs through its centre.
To the north, a military statement said the army's Sixteenth Infantry Division had also recaptured the village of Bawiza and entered another area, Sada, on the city's northern limits, further tightening the circle of forces around IS.
Militias known as Popular Mobilisation forces are also fighting to the west of Mosul to seal the routes to the IS-held town of Tal Afar and its territory in neighbouring Syria, to prevent any retreat or reinforcement.
