Local iSiS fighterS delay moSul fall
With eastern Mosul under government control three months into the US-backed offensive, most residents have STAYED IN THE CITY, COMPLICATING THE TASK OF THE MILITARY, WHICH MUST fiGHT AMONG CIVILIANS IN BUILT-UP AREAS.
As Iraqi government forces advanced towards his eastern Mosul neighbourhood in November, a group of ISIS (Daesh) militants stormed Abu Rami’s home, put a gun to his head and told him and his family to get out immediately.
The militants, including a local man whose name he knew, brought with them a bearded comrade clutching a sniper rifle whom Abu Rami suspects was Russian or Chechen. The foreigner took up position in a rooftop chicken coop.
When Abu Rami returned 11 days later, the fighting had ended and the militants had slipped away, but his twostorey house was destroyed by an air strike. His family is now distributed among relatives and friends across the city.
“Destruction occurs in a few moments, but rebuilding takes time,” he said outside the rubble of his home where men huddled around a well to collect water because pipes have been damaged.
The Mosul campaign, in- volving a 100,000-strong alliance of Iraqi government troops and militarised police, Kurdish security forces and mainly Shia Muslim militiamen, is the most complex battle in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.
With nearly all of eastern Mosul under government control three months into the US- backed offensive, most residents have stayed in the city, complicating the task of the military, which must fight among civilians in built- up areas against an enemy that has targeted non-combatants and hidden among them.
Residents told Reuters during a visit to the Muharibeen district on Friday how the battle played out for them, describing scenes likely repeated in one form or another across the city.
The militants hung curtains across roadways to try to obscure the view of Iraqi army marksmen as they dashed from houses to pray in a tan- colored mosque where they also posted a sniper in the minaret, Abu Rami said.
They kept a car packed with explosives parked opposite his house for more than a week. When they deployed it to a main street, an army tank shelled it, destroying an adjacent building. When it launched the offensive in October, the Iraqi government hoped to retake Mosul — ISIS’s last major stronghold in the country and the largest urban center anywhere in its self-styled caliphate spanning neighboring Syria — by the end of 2016.
But Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in December it could now take another three months to drive the militants out.
Commanders have said the presence of up to 1.5 million residents and attempts to minimize destruction to homes and key infrastructure has slowed their troops’ he said.
US Army LieutenantGeneral Steve Townsend, c o mmande r o f t h e international coalition backing Iraqi forces, told Reuters last week that ISIS’s local leadership had proven effective without a hierarchical chain of command.
But he said that separate cells fighting in different neighborhoods appeared increasingly unable to coordinate across different areas it controlled inside the city.
Another US military official said fighters the coalition observes moving skilfully across Mosul’s urban terrain usually turn out to be foreigners.
According to another Muharibeen resident, who asked not to be named, Islamic State will shoot from a position for several minutes until the military identifies the location. The militants often escape to another house through holes previously knocked through outer walls.
“Then there is bombardment to destroy the house, to destroy the sniper position,” he said. “But the sniper will pop up again here or there.”