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Bartalla /Â AFP
Iraqi special forces advanced on the eastern city limits of Mosul on Monday, tightening the noose as the offensive to retake the IS group stronghold entered its third week.
Elite counter-terrorism forces were facing mortar fire as they pushed from the Christian town of Bartalla towards Mosul’s eastern suburbs, AFP correspondents at the front said.
As an aircraft struck a suspected IS mortar position in the distance, a convoy of Humvees sprayed gunfire across the arid plain at an industrial area still held by extremists.
“The target is to retake Bazwaya and Gogjali, the last two villages before Mosul,” Muntadhar al-Shimmari, a lieutenant colonel with US-trained the Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), said at the front. “If we manage that, we’ll only be a few hundred metres (yards) from Mosul,” he said.
Shimmari said “only a handful of civilians”, mostly members of the Shabak minority, were thought to remain in the two villages.
Backed by air and ground support from a US-led coalition, tens of thousands of Iraqi fighters are converging on Mosul on different fronts, in the country’s biggest military operation in years. On the northern and eastern sides of Mosul, the extremist group’s last major bastion in Iraq, peshmerga forces from the autonomous Kurdish region recently took several villages and consolidated their positions.
New western front
To the south of the city, federal forces, backed by coalition artillery units stationed in the main staging base of Qayyarah, have been pushing north. They have the most ground to cover and are still some distance from the southern limits of Mosul.
Paramilitary forces from the Hashed Al Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation), an umbrella organisation dominated by Iran-backed Shiite militia, opened another front over the weekend.
They are not directly headed for Mosul, instead setting their sights on the town of Tal Afar to the west, with the aim of retaking it and cutting supply lines between Mosul and the Syrian border.
Their leadership says publicly that they do not intend to enter Mosul, which has an overwhelmingly Sunni population, but commanders on the ground say they want to fight inside the city. The initial shaping phase of the operation, during which dozens of villages and several towns have already been retaken from IS, is still under way.
Once the initial phase is over, Iraqi forces are expected to besiege Mosul, attempt to open safe corridors for the million-plus civilians still believed to live there, and breach the city to take on die-hard extremists in street battles. Humanitarian organisations have been fighting against the clock to build up the capacity to handle an expected exodus from the city.
The United Nations says up to a million people could be displaced in the coming weeks.
More than 17,000 people have already fled their homes since the start of the operation and the Norwegian Refugee Council said there were currently only 55,000 more places available in camps.
Post-‘caliphate’ life
In the dozens of villages and towns scattered over territory retaken from IS over the past two weeks, civilians were very slowly returning to a life free from the “caliphate” IS declared in Mosul in 2014.
Qaraqosh, which was previously Iraq’s largest Christian, saw its first mass in more than two years on Sunday. “After two years and three months in exile, I just celebrated the Eucharist in the cathedral of the Immaculate Conception the IS wanted to destroy,” Yohanna Petros Mouche, the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul, said.
Heritage sites at risk againÂ
Baghdad /Â AFP
Iraqi heritage sites targeted in a campaign of destruction by the IS group are again at risk during the operation to retake Mosul from the extremists.
IS vandalised the Mosul museum after overrunning the city in 2014 and attacked sites including the ancient cities of Hatra and Nimrud, posting videos.
As Iraqi forces close in on Mosul, the extremists’ last main bastion in the country, officials say IS has fighters deployed at or near archaeological sites.
“Our information indicates that (IS) has a presence in the archaeological sites,” Ahmed al-Assadi, the spokesman for the Hashed Al-Shaabi, an umbrella organisation for pro-government paramilitary forces, said.
The Hashed Al-Shaabi, the most powerful groups in which are Iran-backed Shiite militias, launched an operation on Saturday that could see it advance through IS-held areas in Nineveh province that are home to some of Iraq’s most famed historical sites. “We expect (IS) will try to lure the advancing forces to the sites for the purpose of increasing their destruction,” Assadi said.
IS had earlier set up a training camp at Hatra, which is a UNESCO world heritage site, and still has militants deployed there, according to Ali Saleh Madhi, the local official responsible for the area.
– Training, arms storage –
At Nimrud, IS rigged structures with explosives and blew up the site, but the jihadists are still present nearby, said Ahmed al-Juburi, the area’s administrator.
Assadi said that Hashed forces would use “extreme care” when they near the sites, and that “every effort must be made to protect and preserve them.”
When the operation to retake Mosul was launched on October 17, the head of UNESCO urged parties to the conflict to protect heritage sites.
“I call on all involved in military action to protect cultural heritage and refrain from any military use or targeting of cultural sites and monuments,” Irina Bokova said.
Both UNESCO and Iraq’s culture ministry said they gave coordinates of heritage sites to anti-IS forces in an effort to protect them.
Deputy Culture Minister Qais Rasheed said that anti-IS forces had been informed of sites where jihadists were present, and that IS “places weapons and sometimes trains its fighters in archaeological areas.”
The lists could help limit air strikes in sensitive areas and encourage Iraqi ground forces to exercise some restraint, but they will not hold IS back.