Noose tightens around militants in Mosul
MOSUL: US-backed Iraqi army units yesterday took control of the last major road out of western Mosul that had been in Islamic State’s (IS) hands, trapping the militants in a shrinking area within the city.
The army’s 9th Armoured Division was within a kilometre of Mosul’s Syria Gate, the city’s northwestern entrance, a general from the unit said.
“We effectively control the road, it is in our sight,” he said.
Mosul residents said they had not been able to travel on the highway that starts at the Syria Gate since Tuesday.
The road links Mosul to Tal Afar, another IS stronghold 60km to the west, and on to Syria.
Iraqi forces captured the eastern side of Mosul in January after 100 days of fighting.
They launched their attack on the districts that lie west of the Tigris River on February 19.
If they defeat IS in Mosul, that would crush the Iraq wing of the caliphate declared by the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in 2014 from the city’s grand old al-Nuri Mosque.
The US-led coalition effort against IS is killing the group’s fighters more quickly than it can replace them, British Major-General Rupert Jones, deputy commander for the Combined Joint Task Force in Iraq said.
With more than 45 000 killed by coalition air strikes up to August, “their destruction just becomes a matter of time”, the general added.
The US commander in Iraq, Lieutenant-General Stephen Townsend, has said he believed US-backed forces will recapture Mosul and Raqqa, IS’s Syria stronghold in neighbouring Syria, within six months.
The closing of the westward highway meant IS were besieged in the city centre, said Lieutenant-General Abdul Wahab al-Saidi, deputy commander of the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS), deployed in the southwestern side.
Units from the elite US-trained division battled incoming sniper and anti-tank fire as they moved eastwards, through Wadi al-Hajar district, and northwards, through the al-Mansour and al-Shuhada districts where gunfire and explosions could be heard.
These moves will allow the CTS to link up with Rapid Response and Federal Police units deployed by the riverside, and to link up with the 9th Armoured Division coming from the west, tightening the noose around the militants.
“Many of them were killed, and for those who are still positioned in the residential neighbourhoods, they either pull back or get killed as our forces move forward,” Saidi said.
Two militants lay dead near the field command of the CTS in the al-Mamoun district, which looked like a ghost town.
A few hundred metres away, a car bomb was hit by an air strike.
The few families who remained in al-Mamoun said they were too scared to leave as the militants had booby-trapped cars.