Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces stormed an Islamic State-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 jihadists in its eastern neighbourhoods.
As the operation against Islamic State’s Iraqi stronghold entered its fourth week, fighters across the border launched an offensive in the Syrian half of the jihadist group’s self-declared caliphate, targeting its base in the city of Raqqa.
An alliance of US-backed Kurdish and Arab groups launched the campaign for Raqqa, where Islamic State has been dug in for nearly three years, with an assault on territory about 50km to the north of the city which they have dubbed Euphrates Anger.
The battle for Raqqa will be every bit as challenging as the one for Mosul, with both cities carrying huge strategic and symbolic value to the jihadists and their self-declared caliphate.
The Iraqi operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga forces and Shia militias, backed by US-led air strikes, has so far gained just a small foothold in Mosul.
The Raqqa campaign, launched amid a complex civil war in Syria which has divided world powers, is not co-ordinated with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad or the Syrian army.
Kurdish manoeuvre
In Bashiqa, some 15km from Mosul, the first waves of a 2,000-strong peshmerga force entered the town on foot and in armoured vehicles.
Artillery had 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 (Islamic State) militants,” Lt-Col Safeen Rasoul told Reuters.
“Our estimates are there are about 100 still left and 10 suicide cars.”
Islamic State 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 that the jihadists 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 15m 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 Lt-Col Qandeel Mahmoud.
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.
Fighting in the town was intense and at one stage a convoy of 40 vehicles was held up by a single Islamic State sniper.
In eastern districts of Mosul, which Iraqi special forces broke into last week, officers say jihadists had melted into the population, ambushing and isolating troops in what the special forces spokesman called the world’s “toughest urban warfare”.
Twin offensives
Mosul, the largest Islamic State-controlled city in either Iraq or Syria, has been held by the group since its fighters drove the Iraqi 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.
Twin offensives on Raqqa and Mosul could bring to an end the self-styled caliphate declared by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque in 2014.
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 Islamic State fighters, who they said had used thousands of residents as human shields, as well as marching many others towards Mosul alongside retreating militants as cover from air strikes.
The UN has warned of a possible exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees from Mosul, which is still home to up to 1.5 million people.
So far 34,000 have been displaced, the International Organisation 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 4km 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 16th 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 Islamic State.
Shia militias are also fighting to the west of Mosul to seal the routes to the Islamic State-held town of Tal Afar and its territory in neighbouring Syria, to prevent any retreat or reinforcement.
Reuters