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Nawaran/AFP
Kurdish forces launched a major assault on Thursday on a town held by the IS group near Mosul, opening a new front in the offensive to wrest back the extremists’ last Iraqi bastion.
Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi told an international meeting in Paris that the offensive was “advancing faster than expected” as it entered its fourth day.
France and Iraq were co-chairing the meeting on the future of Mosul, which observers have warned could raise even greater challenges than the massive military operation to retake it.
In some areas, the Iraqi advance was met by a trickle of civilians fleeing both the fighting and the extremists who ruled them for two years but the feared mass exodus from Mosul has yet to materialise.
The main target of the latest Kurdish push was the town of Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul. Iraqi forces also pressed assaults towards the city from the east and south. Outside Bashiqa, Kurdish peshmerga forces backed by US-led coalition air strikes advanced in armoured vehicles and brought down two small drones IS was using for reconnaissance purposes.
The peshmerga command issued a statement saying the “large-scale operation” was launched at 6:00 am (0300 GMT) near Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul.
“The objectives are to clear a number of nearby villages and secure control of strategic areas to further restrict ISIL’s movements,” it said, using an alternative acronym for IS.
An AFP reporter in Nawaran, outside Bashiqa, saw one of the two drones neutralised by the peshmerga, a Raven RQ-11B model similar to a booby-trapped unmanned aircraft that killed two Kurdish fighters and wounded two French soldiers a week ago.
“These drones belong to IS… So we shot this drone and brought it down. As you can see, the peshmerga destroyed it,” said General Aziz Weysi, commander of the peshmerga’s elite Zaravani task force. “These drones can do observation and can explode. They sent this one but it did not explode,” he said.
Iranian Kurdish rebels of the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK) were involved in the operation alongside the peshmerga and apparently taking a frontline role. East of Mosul, where the peshmerga launched the offensive on Monday, Iraq’s elite federal counter-terrorism service was taking control of Bartalla, a town whose mostly Christian residents fled the IS advance two years ago.
“We started breaching Bartalla early today. There are only 750 metres (yards) to cover to reach the centre,” Lieutenant General Abdelwahab al-Saadi, who is commanding operations in the area, said.
“There is resistance, we already blew up three car bombs today,” he said.
Bartalla, which lies less than 15 kilometres (10 miles) from the eastern edge of Mosul, saw fierce resistance from the extremists earlier this week.