Mosul’s bloody showdown looms
AS THE LARGEST MILITARY OFFENSIVE YET TO OUST ISLAMIC STATE JIHADISTS FROM THE IRAQI CITY OF MOSUL GETS UNDER WAY, FOREIGN EDITOR DAVID PRATT JOINS THE LATEST ADVANCE OF KURDISH PESHMERGA FIGHTERS ATTACKING FROM THE NORTH
Peshmerga and a few thousand Iraqi federal police have been deployed, constituting the biggest operation by Iraqi forces since the 2003 US-led invasion.
For the Peshmerga on Thursday, their target was a further sprawling series of villages to the north and north-east of Mosul still under IS control. On the dry, cracked desert soil near Tel Iskuf, I watched as a group of Peshmerga performed the traditional Kurdish dance linking arms and shuffling one way then the other as the first wave of vehicles rolled out.
As some of the vehicles waited their turn to move off, one of the drivers, a young man called Hassan, told me that he was from Mosul but had fled with his family when IS overran the city in 2014, turning it into the de-facto capital of their Islamic caliphate.
“My uncle was beheaded because he was wearing this,” Hassan tells me pointing to his own uniform implying that his uncle was also a Peshmerga. He says the Kurdish forces should be allowed to enter Mosul along with the Iraqi Army, a contentious issue among some political leaders in Baghdad who are suspicious of the Kurds’ own territorial ambitions. “Not all Arabs belong to Daesh,” Hassan says emphasising that Mosul’s local Arab population have nothing to fear by way of retribution from the Kurds. “We are not like the PopularMobilisationUnits(PMU), wewould protect the innocent women and children,” he insists, referring to the Iraqi Shiite militia which has established a reputation for taking revenge against Sunni Muslims in other towns and cities in Iraq retaken from IS.
Hassan says that he is still in contact with friends in Mosul, a huge risk for them as IS steps up its brutal repression, executing in the most horrific way anyone inside the city communicating with those outside. Like Ferhat before him Hassan too admits that IS will present a formidable challenge.
“We don’t have much in the way of advanced weapons and equipment, but we do have our determination,” he reminded me by way of a parting remark before being ushered into his armoured pick-up truck by fellow fighters of his unit keen to get under way.
No sooner had Hassan’s vehicle moved off however than a peculiar buzzing sound could be heard just a few hundred feet in the sky above us. Looking up along with hundreds of Peshmerga, we saw what was a small IS surveillance drone.
Leaving our own driver, Bekus, in what we thought was the comparative safety of the Peshmerga main redoubt, fearful of putting him unnecessarily in harms way by accompanying us forward, myself and a colleague managed to hitch a lift along with the Peshmerga convoy.
Only later that day on our return to the position, did we find out that the drone had again flown over the same Kurdish frontline, this time to be blasted from the sky by a mass fusillade of small arms fire from the Peshmerga waiting to join the second wave of the operation.
Our earlier offer of a lift along with the Peshmerga convoy came from a reporter and cameraman from the Iraqi television political channel Rega, a media outlet widely associated with the Communist Party of Kurdistan (CPK). Both journalists as well as their driver and bodyguard were from the