Iraqi forces battle IS on edge of Mosul

Arbil / AFP

Elite Iraqi forces battled the IS group on the eastern edge of Mosul on Tuesday, with a top commander saying the “true liberation” of the extremist-held city had begun.
Amid heavy fighting on the eastern front over the past two days, forces from Iraq’s US-trained Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) had advanced into Gogjali, a village separated from Mosul by a large cemetery.
“Now is the beginning of the true liberation of the city of Mosul,” Staff General Taleb Sheghati al-Kenani, the commander of CTS, told Iraqiya state television from Gogjali.
Staff Lieutenant General Abdelwahab al-Saadi, a senior CTS officer, said in televised remarks that the “clearing operation is still ongoing” in Gogjali, which its forces had stormed in a two-pronged assault on Tuesday morning. “The next (step) will be towards Al-Zahra and Al-Karama,” he said by telephone from the front, referring to two neighbourhoods on the eastern side of Mosul.
Backed by air and ground support from a US-led coalition, tens of thousands of Iraqi fighters are converging on Mosul, the last major city in the country under IS control.
Since the offensive was launched on October 17, federal forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have retaken a series of villages as they advance on the city from the north, east and south.

‘Die or surrender’
CTS forces—who were the last to retreat from Mosul when IS seized the city in June 2014—are anxious to be the first back inside the city.
As his forces advanced, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi warned the extremists they would have no place to run. “We will close in on (IS) from every place,” he said on state television on Monday, dressed in a camouflage uniform. “They don’t have an exit, they don’t have an escape, they can only surrender—they can die or they can surrender,” Abadi said. Some 4,000 to 7,000 extremists are believed to be in and around Mosul, where IS chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the group’s cross-border “caliphate” after the group seized control of large parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria two
years ago. For now the extremists do have an escape route—to the west towards IS-controlled territory in neighbouring Syria. Paramilitary forces from the Hashed Al Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation), an umbrella organisation dominated by Iran-backed Shiite militia, launched an assault at the weekend to cut off that route.
They have been advancing north, their sights set on the town of Tal Afar which commands the city’s western approaches. On the northern and eastern sides of Mosul, peshmerga forces from the autonomous Kurdish region have taken a series of villages and towns and consolidated their positions.

Initial phase
To the south, 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.
The initial shaping phase of the operation is still under way.
Once it is over, Iraqi forces are expected to besiege Mosul, try to open safe corridors for the million-plus civilians still believed to be inside, and then enter 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 mass exodus from the city.
The United Nations says up to a million people could be displaced in the coming weeks.
More than 17,900 people have already fled their homes since the operation began, according to the International Organisation for Migration. IS has been losing ground steadily in Iraq since 2015 and the outcome of the Mosul battle is in little doubt, but commanders have warned it could last months. If the city is retaken, only Raqa in Syria will remain as the last major city under the extremists’ control.

UN: More civilians forced to Mosul, possibly as shields 

Geneva / AFP

The UN said on Tuesday it had received more reports of IS group fighters forcing thousands of civilians into Mosul, possibly to be used as human shields against advancing Iraqi troops. The extremists also reportedly killed another 40 former Iraqi Security Force (ISF) members before dumping their bodies in the river, UN rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told reporters in Geneva.
The rights office has listed numerous IS atrocities, including tens of thousands of forced relocations and hundreds of executions, allegedly committed in and around Mosul since a government operation to retake the northern city began last month. Some of the allegations have been termed “preliminary” and needing more investigation.
Asked about the credibility of the fresh reports, Shamdasani said: “This is raw information. It hasn’t gone through our usual verification processes,” while stressing that rights office sources were “reliable.”
In the early hours of Monday, IS fighters “brought dozens of long trucks and mini-buses to Hamam al-Alil City, south of Mosul, in an attempt to forcibly transfer some 25,000 civilians towards locations in and around Mosul,” the rights office said in a statement.
Most of the vehicles were prevented from reaching Mosul because of coalition aircraft patrolling the area, the statement added.
Shamdasani said there was “a pattern” of the extremists surrounding their offices and bases with civilians.
“That seems to support the assertion that they are planning to use these people as human shields as well as to make sure that the area is heavily populated with civilians to frustrate a military operation against them,” she added.