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BAGHDAD /Â AP
Iraqi troops consolidated gains in their advance on the northern city of Mosul on Thursday, regrouping as they clear neighbourhoods and houses once occupied by the IS group.
In Mosul proper, where troops have a foothold in a sliver of territory in the city’s east, the special forces control the Zahra neighborhood, once named after former dictator Saddam Hussein, military officials said.
They have taken at least half of the Aden neighborhood and clashes were still ongoing there, while the regular army’s ninth division is stationed in east Mosul’s Intisar neighborhood, they added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief reporters.
Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the US-led forces operating the key air campaign against IS, said that advancing troops and aircraft have destroyed some 70 tunnels the extremists had been using to launch surprise attacks from inside densely populated areas.
“They’ve set up elaborate defenses, and we have to assume they’ll do anything among the civilian population because they don’t care about anyone,” he said, noting that airstrikes had hit hundreds of IS positions in the three-week old Mosul campaign.
Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the country’s second largest city and the last major IS holdout in Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga forces are holding a line outside the city in the north, while Iraqi army and militarized police units approach from the south and government-sanctioned Shiite militias are guarding the western approaches.
The offensive has slowed in recent days as the special forces, the troops who have advanced the farthest, push into more densely populated areas of the city’s east, where they cannot rely as much on airstrikes and shelling because of the risk posed to civilians who have been told to stay in their homes.
Brig. Firas Bashar, spokesman for Nineveh operations command, says troops south of Mosul have been stopped at the town of Hamam Al-Alil while other forces push forward on the city.
To the northeast, about 13 kilometers from the city, peshmerga continued to take territory in the town of Bashiqa, believed to be largely deserted except for dozens of IS fighters. They have had the town surrounded for weeks, and have assaulted it with mortar and artillery fire.
At an area church in territory freshly freed from the militants’ grip, priests rang bells for the first time in two years as the peshmerga worked to secure the town.
“We are so happy at the liberation,” said priest Elkhoury Alfaran Elkhoury at the Mart Shoomy Church in Bahzani, a village near Bashiqa. “They want to give a message to the world, and that message is damage, their message is destruction, their message is death,” he said, highlighting damage to the church made by the extremists while they occupied the area.
In New York, the UN said the progress meant that the days were numbered for the self-styled caliphate declared by IS from Mosul in 2014.
“This liberation operation marks the beginning of the end of the so-called IS caliphate’ in Iraq,” the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Wednesday.
Jan Kubis said that the UN’s humanitarian agencies were preparing to shelter even more of the tens of thousands of displaced people as winter approaches. He also warned that reconciliation and restoration of confidence in the government was necessary if the victories against IS are to be lasting.
Battle for Mosul nears Nimrud
Baghdad / WAM
The battle for Iraq’s second city Mosul neared the remains of ancient Nimrud on Thursday, the military said, raising fears for the famed heritage site already ravaged by extremist bombs and sledgehammers.
Troops and allied militia were advancing on two villages held by the IS group near the ancient site some 30 kilometres south of Mosul, the Joint Operations Command said. “Units of the 9th Armoured Division and the Hashed al-Ashaeri are beginning to advance to liberate the villages of Abbas Rajab and Al-Nomaniyah, toward Nimrud,” it said. Nimrud was the one of the great centres of the ancient Middle East. Founded in the 13th Century BC, it became the capital of the Assyrian empire, whose rulers built vast palaces and monuments that have drawn archaeologists from around the world for more than 150 years. Many of its monumental stone sculptures and reliefs were taken way for display in museums around the world.