Iraqi forces push into Mosul
Elite fighters trained, backed by U.S. seize neighborhood
IRBIL, Iraq — Facing Islamic State artillery, snipers and suicide attacks, Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces breached Mosul’s city limits Tuesday, officers said, the first time government forces have entered the city in more than two years.
The advance from the east was a breakthrough in efforts over more than two weeks to reclaim Mosul from the Islamic State. But a great deal of fighting remains: Even as the counterterrorism forces try to push toward the center of Iraq’s second-largest city, Iraqi army soldiers are approaching from the south.
The counterterrorism units, which have training and equipment from the U.S. and work closely with U.S. military advisers, moved into the Gogjali neighborhood Tuesday. The area was the first they reached within city limits after going village by village for the past two weeks.
Troops later entered the outskirts of the more builtup Karama district, said Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces. As the sun went down, a sandstorm blew in, reducing visibility to only 100 yards and bringing the day’s combat to an end.
“Daesh is fighting back and have set up concrete blast walls to block off the Karama neighborhood and our troops’ advance,” al-Aridi said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State.
He said bombs have been laid along the road into the city.
Later, al-Aridi said the troops had taken the state television building, the only one in the province, and that heavy fighting broke out when they tried to continue farther into the city. An official casualty report was not given, but officers mentioned one dead and one wounded.
Two officers reached by cellphone said the fighting had been fierce but that they were confident the Gogjali neighborhood, known for its cattle farming, would be secured soon.
“We are facing tough resistance,” one special operations forces officer, Capt. Raad Hussein, said as gunfire crackled in the background. “But we will get it.”
Staff Gen. Taleb Shighati al-Kenani, the top counterterrorism force commander, said on state television that “now is the beginning of the true liberation of the city of Mosul.”
Tuesday’s battle opened with Iraqi artillery, tank and machine-gun fire on Islamic State positions on the edge of Gogjali, with the extremists responding with guided anti-tank missiles and small arms in an attempt to block the advance. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition supported the advance.
Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said aerial observations of the battlefield showed that Islamic State forces can no longer move in large numbers.
“If Daesh stand and fight, they’re going to be killed. There’s no question about that. If they run, they will either be captured or killed. They are not going to be allowed to escape,” he said in a televised news conference with Iraqi forces in Qayara, south of Mosul.
“When we see them come together where there are significant numbers, we will strike them and kill them.”
The U.S. military estimates that the Islamic State has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in Mosul and another 1,500 to 2,500 in its outer defensive belt. That total includes about 1,000 foreign fighters. They stand against an anti-Islamic State force of some 40,000, including army units, militarized police, special forces and Kurdish fighters.
RESIDENTS DISPLACED
Inside the village of Bazwaya, 3 miles east of Mosul, white flags hung from buildings, put up a day earlier by residents eager to show they would not resist the Iraqi forces’ advance. Some residents stood outside their homes, and children raised their hands with V-for-victory signs.
The families, estimated to number in the hundreds, will be evacuated from the village to a camp for displaced persons, said Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil of the Iraqi special forces.
As the fighting raged on Mosul’s outskirts, several of the newly displaced from Bazwaya could be seen carrying white flags as they drove a herd of some 150 sheep toward the camp.
Emad Hassan, 33, a former policeman, said he went to Bazwaya when the operation to retake Mosul started, after fleeing Islamic State fighters in the city.
“When I knew the security forces were serious about liberating Mosul, I came here,” he said. “Daesh was preventing families from moving toward the security forces and ordered them into the city center, but I refused.”
Aid officials, noting that as many as 1 million people could remain in and around Mosul, have been preparing for a new wave of civilians fleeing the area. More than 3 million people in the country have already been driven from their homes because of violence.
Some families were al- ready streaming out of Gogjali on Tuesday, according to a witness and images on local television, but it was not immediately clear how many. The Iraqi government, dropping fliers over the city and broadcasting radio announcements, has been urging civilians to stay in their homes to avert a larger humanitarian crisis.
But if civilians do remain in their homes, it presents new challenges to the security forces, as the soldiers fighting in eastern Mosul found out Tuesday.
Brig. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a commander in the counterterrorism forces, said he was surprised that so many families had remained in the neighborhood, which made it difficult for his men to clear the houses and check for hidden militants. Still, he said it turned out well because many civilians, waving white flags, cooperated with his soldiers and provided information about where Islamic State fighters were hiding.
Since the Mosul campaign began, about 18,000 people have been displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration, which on Tuesday described that figure as a low estimate. That could change in the coming days, as many of the villages secured outside Mosul over the past two weeks were mostly uninhabited.
At the same time, the Islamic State has herded thousands of civilians — sometimes putting them in buses, in other cases forcing them to walk — and moved them to Mosul to be used as human shields. That tactic, in addition to terrorizing the population, aims to make it harder for the U.S.-led coalition to carry out airstrikes without causing civilian casualties.
The Islamic State was able to seize Mosul and other territories in Iraq in 2014 by exploiting the grievances of the Sunni community toward the Shiite-led government, and by offering protection. Many Sunnis welcomed the group, but now most of the civilians who have fled lands the militants control say they came to detest the group’s brutality.
“We thought they represented Islam,” said Umm Ahmed, a woman who recently arrived at a camp east of Mosul for the displaced. “We thought they were good people. They were liars.”
She said she had lost her 1-year-old baby as she fled the fighting in her village last week.
With her other children around her in the tent, she offered one example of the horrors of living under the Islamic State: Her 8-year-old son, sitting at her side, has mostly been out of school for more than two years.
In the first days after the militants took her village, she said, he and other schoolchildren were forced to watch videos of beheadings in a classroom.
“He had nightmares and was unable to sleep,” she said. “Still, I am shaking when I think about Daesh.”
TURK FORCE ON BORDER
With Iraq’s focus on extremists in Mosul, neighboring Turkey is making preparations against another militant group along its border with Iraq. Turkey’s defense minister said Tuesday that his country is preparing for “all kinds of possibilities” in deploying tanks and other vehicles to the border.
Fikri Isik said the deployment is in response to “important developments in our region,” including events in
neighboring Iraq and Turkey’s fight against outlawed Kurdish rebels.
“On the one hand, there is a serious struggle against terrorism inside Turkey; on the other hand, there are important developments on the other side of the border,” the state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Isik as saying. “Turkey is in the position of making preparations for all kinds of possibilities.”
Turkish state media, quoting unnamed military sources, reported that tanks and military vehicles were moving from Ankara and the nearby province of Cankiri toward the border town of Silopi.
The deployment comes days after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that Turkey would be closely monitoring Shiite militias’ behavior in northern Iraq and seeking to safeguard the rights of ethnic Turkmens there. Erdogan said the militias could prompt a Turkish response if they terrorize the Iraqi-Turkmen town of Tal-Afar.
Last week, Erdogan also suggested that Turkey’s military could pursue Kurdish rebels across the border into northern Iraq’s Sinjar region, which he said was fast becoming a new base for the banned Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Turkey’s air force regularly carries out raids in northern Iraq against targets of the Workers’ Party, which has led a three-decade-long insurgency against Turkey from bases in northern Iraq.
“We are facing tough resistance,” one Iraqi special operations forces officer, Capt. Raad Hussein, said as gunfire crackled in the background. “But we will get it.”