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IRAQI FORCES BATTLED today through booby-traps, sniper fire and suicide car bombs to tighten the noose around Mosul, while also hunting Islamic State group jihadists behind attacks elsewhere in the country.
Kurdish forces announced a new push at dawn on Bashiqa northeast of Mosul where some 10,000 fighters are engaged in a huge assault to take the IS-held city.
The push came with US Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter in Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan to support the unprecedented offensive, which a US-led coalition is backing with air and ground support.
Launched last Monday, the assault aims to reclaim the last major Iraqi city under IS control, dealing another setback to the jihadists’ self-declared “caliphate” in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
The jihadists hit back on Friday with a surprise assault on the Kurdish-controlled city of Kirkuk and two days later security forces were still tracking down fighters involved in the attack.
The dozens of attackers, including several suicide bombers, failed to seize control of key government buildings but sowed chaos in Kirkuk, a large oil-rich and ethnically mixed city.
At least 51 of the jihadists had been killed, including three more on Sunday, local security officials said.
Sporadic clashes continued, a senior security official said, with forces besieging IS gunmen in Kirkuk’s Nidaa neighbourhood.
At least 46 people, most of them members of the security forces, were killed in the raid and ensuing clashes.
Kurdish and other forces were also tracking down jihadists believed to have fled Kirkuk on Saturday to rural areas east of the city.
IS jihadists also attacked Rutba, a remote town near the Jordanian border in the western province of Anbar, with five suicide car bombs, the area’s top army commander said on Sunday.
The attackers briefly seized the mayor’s office but security forces quickly regained the upper hand, he said.
Fierce IS resistance
The spectacular attack in Kirkuk, of a type observers warned could happen more often as IS loses territory and reverts to a traditional insurgency, temporarily drew attention away from Mosul.
But there was no sign it had any significant impact on the offensive to retake the city, Iraq’s largest military operation in years.
On a trip to Iraq to review the operation, Carter met Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi on Saturday and Kurdish leader Massud Barzani on Sunday.
The United States leads a 60-nation coalition — which also includes Britain and France — that has provided support in the form of thousands of air strikes, training for Iraqi forces and advisers on the ground.
Tens of thousands of fighters, including Iraqi federal troops and Kurdish peshmerga, are taking part in the assault.
Engaged on the northern and eastern fronts, the peshmerga are expected to stop along a line at an average of 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the boundaries of the city proper.
“They are pretty much there,” a US military official said on Saturday, adding that the lines “will be solidified in the next day or two.”
Elite federal forces are also fighting to retake control of Qaraqosh, which lies just east of Mosul and used to be the largest Christian town in Iraq.
IS fighters swept across the Nineveh plain in August 2014, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee, including many Christians and other minorities.
Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, commander of the US-led coalition, said Saturday that jihadist resistance was stiff.
“It’s pretty significant, we are talking about enemy indirect fire, multiple IEDs (improvised explosive devices), multiple VBIED (vehicle-borne IEDs) each day, even some anti-tank guided missiles,” he said in Baghdad.
US military officials have revised their estimate slightly upward for the number of IS fighters in and around Mosul.
5,000 displaced
They believe IS is defending Mosul, where the “caliphate” was proclaimed in June 2014, with 3,000 to 5,000 fighters inside the city and 1,000 to 2,000 in the outskirts.
A French government official told AFP the breach into Mosul, which could mark the beginning of a phase of fierce street battles with IS, could still be a month away.
There is deep concern for an estimated 1.2 million civilians still believed to be in the city.
Several thousand civilians fleeing the fighting and the jihadists who ruled them for two years have escaped to camps for the displaced south of Mosul.
“Over 5,000 people are currently displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance,” the United Nations said in an update on Sunday.
“Population movements are fluctuating as the front lines move, including people returning to their homes following improved security conditions in the immediate area,” the statement said.
Iraqi forces are now fighting in sparsely populated areas but when they near the limits of the city itself aid groups fear the start of a huge exodus.
A million people could be displaced, sparking an unprecedented humanitarian emergency in a country where more than three million people have already been forced from their homes since the start of 2014.
- © AFP 2016.
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The difference in reporting between this and Aleppo. Do the journalists at The Journal, mostly young I presume, take their profession seriously? Because “the line” being pushed here is so biased it can only be described as Churnalism. The regurgitation of Reuters reports. What would be headline news if this were Aleppo is instead relegated to two sentences in the last paragraph. What in Mosul are called jihadists are called rebels in Aleppo. And what of the deadly aerial cylinder bombs being dropped on Mosul? Are the much more benign than rudimentary “barrel bombs” (rusty one’s according to the White Helmets) we are told are supposedly being dropped on Aleppo? Really The Journal. If you call yourselves journalists then report like journalists are supposed to.
@Veron Skvortsova: Careful now or you’ll soon have master culligan and other US state dept. parrots on to you, to explain the beneficial effects of ‘smart bombs’ as opposed to those nasty Russian ones in East Aleppo.
@Veron Skvortsova: If we want journalists to be journalists again then we’ll have to start paying them again. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
A couple of good reads
Compare the coverage of Mosul and East Aleppo and it tells you a lot about the propaganda we consume
In both countries, two large Sunni Arab urban centres – East Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq – are being besieged by pro-government forces strongly supported by foreign airpower. Yet the coverage is very different Patrick Cockburn
https://goo.gl/eK3cW4
Bombed Stupid A 2015 classic from Gary Brecher AKA The War Nerd archives
And at the moment, the Anglo media is all scared about the Russian air strikes in Syria. So they’ve started a counter-bombardment of their own, dumping tons of stupid on us helpless civilians.
https://goo.gl/J3V7UW
So Mercurial, you’re trying to say that smart bombs which can be dropped within a metre of the intended target are no improvement over crude barrels filled with ad hoc shrapnel that can land anywhere in a 100m radius of their target (meaning aiming near a school can easily mean hitting said school)?
At a glance the guy in the top picture looks badass but if you look closer he’s armed with a pair of scissors and a couple of permanent markers
Exactly the badass tools a Medic needs.. very important guys in a battle.
Another fine mess from Bush.
@David Dickenson: Did Bush invade the Philippines too?
“The captain and one crew member of a South Korean cargo ship have been abducted by suspected Abu Sayyaf fighters in the southern Philippines, according to military officials.
Naval patrols off Tawi-Tawi and nearby Sulu, where fighters take most of their kidnapping victims, have been strengthened in recent months due to a spate of abductions, Tan told the Associate Press news agency.
“We do our best to secure that area but it’s a wide body of water,” Tan said by telephone.
Abu Sayyaf, which has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS), has entrenched its network in recent years with vast sums of ransom money.
The group began abducting sailors in border waters between Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines early this year, taking several dozen Indonesian and Malaysian hostages.
The armed fighters also beheaded two Canadian hostages and released a Norwegian man along with a number of Indonesian and Malaysian sailors in the past.
Military sources say the group is still holding a Dutch hostage, five Malaysians, two Indonesians and four Filipinos in their jungle stronghold in the southern Philippines.”
What has the Philippines got to do with Bush? If that simpleton didn’t illegally invade Iraq none of this would have happened!
@PaulJ: One of the causes of IS is the global growth of violent jihadism since about the 1970′s. It’s a global phenomenon which has its roots in the Islamic world dating back to the militant strain which has existed within Islam since its foundation. Western imperialism contributed to its revival and popular support but it has an independent existence of its own.
IS is just one of hundreds of jihadist groups worldwide who share the same basic ideology and goals – like Abu Sayyaf. You can’t defeat an enemy that you don’t understand. The state of Iraq has more than one cause. That’s why a focus on one cause of one battle – say, Bush and Iraq – will lead to continued failure in fighting the actual war.
I like the USA. As a place to love as a holiday destination and for the amazing welcome the Americans give. Plus let’s be fair the better quality lifestyle. That being said bush needs to be before the ICC that man destroyed the middle east. All of today’s problems came from him. One would hope his name echoes through the ages with stain Hitler Mao Kim jong sung/il/Un polpot as the butchers of humanity
Look at global Islamic terrorism today compared to before the US war on terror. Their numbers have multiplied by thousands as a result of their invasions and support for terrorists which, instead of targeting the actual islamists and their source in the Arabian Gulf, instead targeted three countries which allowed all religions to practice and live in peace. Syria, Libya and Iraq were amongst the safest places for Christian’s in the Arab world and Islamic extremism was not tolerated yet these countries were targeted. Look at the state if them now, overrun by head hacking lunatics while their allies Qatar and Saudi Arabia support IS. Do you seriously think Iraq would be in the state it us today if the Yanks didn’t invade it?
Iraq is now a democratic country because of Bush who liberated the country and is also now an friend of the west especially America who is assisting the Iraqi army in taking back there city from terrorist. But don’t let the facts get in the way of your anti Bush simpleton few of the world.
@PaulJ: It’s a positive feedback loop. American public opinion notices the rise of Islamism (starting with Iran in the 70′s). So they support US interventionism (which US military industrial interests also conveniently benefit from in the short term). That leads to increased popular support for the jihadists. And so the loop continues.
But here’s the kicker – any state that openly accuses the Gulf states of funding violent jihad will be hit where it hurts – at the petrol pump. The general public would love to see the likes of the Saudis etc taken to task, in theory, but politicians are well aware that they’ll baulk pretty quickly once they realize that that would have a cost. They remember the oil crises of the 1970′s.
The oil states of the middle east have the western public by the b****s and they know it. That’s why a US presidential candidate, Hillary, can take donations from those states, which is treason, and half the American electorate will pretend they don’t know that and vote for her anyway. Irish and other western European politicians and citizens, equally, look the other way when the Saudis and Qataris buy influence here. We’ve sold out for a bag of silver.
@Stephen: That depends on what you mean by democratic. It’s now under sharia law. That is democratic in the sense that that’s what the vast majority of Iraqi muslims want. Democracy in Iraq means allowing people to live under laws that are incompatible with human rights – as determined by the European Court of Human Rights and the House of Lords.
I certainly think they should be free to be ruled as they wish, but it’s important that people understand that ‘democracy’ in Iraq does not mean quite the same thing as it means to most western Europeans.
“Opponents argue that the vote infringes constitutional guarantees of freedom of religious belief for minority groups such as Christians.”
“Ammar Toma, an MP who supported the ban, argued that it was justified because the constitution stipulates that ‘no law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.’”
@Marlowemallow: “Parliament in Iraq has voted to ban the sale, import and production of alcohol, with backers of the move arguing that its availability contradicts Islam and is unconstitutional.”
And while all this was going on the UN international Israeli-bashing Jew-haters diverted all most all of the humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian terrorists Hamas/ISIS and thelike.
Palestinian Hamas an co. got 11 times more aid than poor and conflicted deserving states.
—”According to a report last year by Global Humanitarian Assista—”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-does-all-that-aid-for-palestinians-go-1453669813nce, in 2013 the Palestinians received $793 million in international aid, second only to Syria. This amounts to $176 for each Palestinian, by far the highest per capita assistance in the world. Syria, where more than 250,000 people have been killed and 6.5 million refugees displaced since 2011, received only $106 per capita.—
—” though the Palestinians are more than twice as wealthy on average than these eight countries, they receive more than 11 times as much foreign aid per person. The Democratic Republic of Congo is a case in point: Its 79 million people have a per capita GDP of $700, yet they receive only $5.70 in aid per person.—”
http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-does-all-that-aid-for-palestinians-go-1453669813
“seconf” class reporting
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