Truro News

Casualties mount as Iraqi troops advance in Mosul

- MOSUL, IRAq

“We have wounded!” the men shouted from the roadside. Two soldiers, bleeding, were being bandaged beside their smoking vehicle on the side of a dusty dirt road.

Iraqi special forces Maj. Saif Ali yelled to his driver to stop and leaped out. “Put one inside and the other on top!” he called to his men. One was put in Ali’s seat, the other laid on the vehicle’s hood. “Go!” he shouted, crouching on the hood next to the wounded man. His driver blared the horn and the gunner shot into the air trying to clear a way through a sea of fleeing civilians and livestock.

As Iraqi forces push deeper into western Mosul, the assault is bringing a surge of casualties – at least 30 Iraqi security forces and more than 200 civilians killed or wounded in the last three days. Iraq’s military does not release official casualty reports, but medics at front-line clinics provided figures on condition of anonymity.

The sudden spike in casualty numbers mirrors what played out in Mosul’s east as the fight moved from rural villages to dense urban areas. Front-line medic stations that stood empty for the first days of the assault on Mosul’s west announced last week, are now overflowin­g. At one clinic Sunday, the dead had to be moved to the ground to free up beds as more injured arrived.

On Sunday afternoon Iraq’s

special forces were still struggling to clear the Mamun neighbourh­ood, bringing them back to a phase of grueling urban combat similar to the fight for eastern Mosul in early November when military attrition rates spiked.

Iraqi forces at a base a few kilometres south of the front called in airstrikes to take out small units of two or three IS fighters who repeatedly managed to halt advancing Iraqi convoys.

The number of car bombs targeting Iraqi forces in western Mosul has been fewer than what forces experience­d in the east: approximat­ely four a day in the west compared to more than dozen a day in the east.

But the number of armed

IS drones has ballooned. In a singled day drones dropped more than 70 munitions on Iraqi forces. The bombs mostly caused light injuries but they disrupted operations and monopolize­d the finite surveillan­ce capabiliti­es available from Iraq’s military and the U.S.-led coalition backing the Mosul fight.

The whizz of mortars on the edge of Mamun neighbourh­ood repeatedly sent families scattering for cover as they tried to flee Mosul’s city limits. The route civilians are using to flee Mosul’s west on foot is still within mortar range of IS fighters inside the city and largely out in the open, leaving people more vulnerable than those who fled the city’s eastern side.

 ?? AP PHOtO ?? An Iraqi Army soldier, right, helps displaced civilians as they flee their homes as a result of fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants, on the western side of Mosul yesterday.
AP PHOtO An Iraqi Army soldier, right, helps displaced civilians as they flee their homes as a result of fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants, on the western side of Mosul yesterday.

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