British and US special forces play key role in battle for Mosul airport

port and military complex, including barracks and training grounds that sprawl across an area near the BaghdadMosul highway, was captured by IS fighters when they overran the northern city in June 2014.

Iraqi forces have already seized back control of the east of the city and are now targeting the west.

The campaign, backed up by RAF and other allied air strikes, involves a 100,000-strong force of Iraqi troops, Kurdish fighters and Shia militias.

The battle for western Mosul, the extremists’ last major urban bastion in Iraq, is expected to be more difficult than driving them out of the east.

The streets are older and narrower in this section of the city, stretching west from the Tigris River that divides Mosul into the eastern and western half.

Iraqi troops are likely to have to carry out house-by-house fighting, with extremists having booby-trapped buildings and planted other improvised explosive devices. Hundreds of thousands of citizens are also trapped in neighbourhoods controlled by IS.

However, IS fighters may flee Mosul, which once had a population of two million, when it becomes clear that they are facing defeat.

In Syria, Turkish army chiefs said forces they are backing and US-led coalition air strikes killed 56 IS militants around the town of al-Bab in the latest operations yesterday.

British jihadists in Syria and Iraq are continuing to be targeted by Allied forces and RAF drones.

Five teenagers were arrested in London this week on suspicion of planning to travel to Syria or Iraq to join a proscribed organistion. @nicholascecil