Iraqi Special Forces said they pushed deeper into Mosul Friday despite heavy resistance from ISIL militants using civilians as cover, and were holding half a dozen city neighborhoods seized in the last 10 days.
The elite Counter Terrorism Service troops broke through ISIL defense lines to enter the city early last week and have since been embroiled in a brutal, close-quarter combat with waves of suicide bombers and snipers.
The Special Forces are the spearhead of a wider coalition of 100,000 fighters seeking to crush a few thousand ISIL militants who have ruled Mosul, the biggest city of their cross-border “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria, for the last two years.
Security forces and army infantry divisions are preparing to move on southern and northern districts of Mosul in coming days, to step up pressure on the militants.
Kurdish peshmerga and popular paramilitary forces are holding territory to the northeast and to the west.
On the eastern front, special forces pushed into the Qadisiya al-Thaniya district, on the northern edge of the small pocket of neighborhoods they control so far, Sabah al-Numani, spokesman for the Counter Terrorism Service, told Reuters.
“We have encountered heavy resistance from the enemy,” he said, with what he called “obstructive patrols” of militant forces trying to hold up the advance. “We are facing the most difficult form of urban warfare, fighting with the presence of civilians, but our forces are trained for this sort of combat.”
Military officers have told Reuters that the fighting is some of the most lethal they have seen, with small groups of militants using a vast network of tunnels and narrow streets to launch an apparently endless sequence of attacks against troops.
A Reuters correspondent in Kokjali, on the eastern edge of the city, saw US Apache helicopters overhead. Explosions, either from airstrikes or suicide car bombs which the militants have deployed in the hundreds since the campaign started on Oct. 17, could be heard against a backdrop of artillery fire.
As smoke rose above the city, hundreds of civilians were on the streets of Kokjali, some of them local residents but others fleeing the fighting in Mosul itself.
Numani said the army had told civilians to stay indoors for their safety, adding that the counterterrorism unit aimed to hand over neighborhoods that it had secured to other forces. In other cities retaken from ISIL, local police forces have moved in after the special forces have cleared territory.
To the south, some 20 kilometers from Mosul, Iraqi forces paused their advance to prepare for a push to take Mosul airport on the city’s southern edge. Advancing from Qayyarah air base over the past month, Iraq’s army and federal police have cleared tens of villages along the Tigris River valley and in Ninevah desert. Now, Iraqi forces say they are preparing for an assault on the southern edge of the city itself.
Inside Mosul, a city which is still home to up to 1.5 million people, residents said this week that the militants had killed at least 20 people and displayed their bodies – five of them crucified – as a warning against acting as informants for Iraqi forces.
Source: Reuters
