Forces close in on Mosul to retake IS stronghold in Iraq
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IRAQI and Kurdish forces closing in on Mosul said yesterday they had secured some 20 villages on the outskirts of the city in the first day of an operation to retake Islamic State’s last major stronghold in Iraq.
With around 1.5 million people still living in Mosul, the International Organization for Migration said it was preparing gas masks in case of chemical attack by the jihadists, who had used such weapons previously against Iraqi Kurdish forces.
The fall of Mosul would signal the defeat of the ultra-hardline Sunni jihadists in Iraq but could also lead to land grabs and sectarian bloodletting between groups which fought one another after the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
For US President Barack Obama, the campaign is a calculated risk, with US officials acknowledging there is no clear plan for how the region around Mosul will be governed once Islamic State is expelled.
The Iraqi army and Peshmerga forces from autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan began moving towards the city at dawn on Monday under air cover from a US-led coalition set up after Islamic State swept into Iraq from Syria in 2014.
Hoshiyar Zebari, a senior Kurdish official, said initial operations succeeded due to close cooperation between the Iraqi government and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, allowing them to clear Islamic State from nine or 10 villages east of Mosul.
“Daesh is disoriented, they don’t know whether to expect attacks from the east or west or north,” he told reporters, using an Arabic acronym for the hardline Sunni group.
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and explosives expert Fawzi Ali Nouimeh were both in the city, according to what he described as “solid” intelligence reports, indicating the group would put up significant resistance.
A total of 20 villages were taken from the militants east, south and southeast of Mosul by early yesterday, according to statements from the two forces, fighting alongside one another for the first time.
On Monday, Islamic State said its fighters had targeted the attacking forces with 10 suicide bombs and that their foes had surrounded five villages but not taken them.
The advancing forces were still between 20 and 50 kilometers from Mosul and officials described it as a “shaping operation” designed to enhance positions ahead of a major offensive by taking hilltops, crossings and important crossroads.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the offensive on Monday around two years after Iraq’s second-largest city fell to the militants, who exploited the civil war that broke out in Syria in 2011 to seize territory there.
The operation had been planned since July with US and other coalition forces and Western and Iraqi officials, mindful of the civil war that followed Saddam’s fall, say plans for administering the mainly Sunni city and accommodating those who flee the fighting are in place.
The United Nations has said up to a million people could flee the city and it expected the first wave in five or six days.
Fighting is expected to take weeks, if not months, as some 30,000 government forces, Sunni tribal fighters and Kurdish Peshmerga first encircle the city then attempt to oust up to 8,000 Islamic State militants.
More than 5,000 US soldiers are also deployed in support missions, as are troops from France, Britain, Canada and other Western nations.
The Iraqi army is attacking Mosul on the southern and southeastern fronts, while the Peshmerga carried out their operation to the east.
The Peshmerga said they had secured “a significant stretch” of the 80 kilometer road between Erbil, their capital, and Mosul, about an hour’s drive to the west.
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