Last push to dislodge IS from Iraq as coalition launches attack
● Operation continues to drive IS from last major urban bastion
Confident and well-armed Iraqi soldiers head into battle to flush out Islamic State terrorists from Mosul, the group’s last urban stronghold In Iraq. But the fight to oust IS fighters from the western part of the ancient city, with its warren of streets and alleys, promises to be long, bloody and brutal.
Iraqi forces launched a major air-and-ground offensive yesterday to retake western Mosul from Islamic State militants and drive the extremist group from its last major urban bastion in Iraq.
Ground units pushed into a belt of villages outside the country’s second-largest city, and plumes of smoke rose into the sky early in the morning as Us-led coalition jets struck militant positions southwest of Mosul and militarised Iraqi police fired artillery.
“This is zero hour and we are going to end this war, God willing,” said Mahmoud Mansour, a police officer, as he prepared to move out.
The United Nations warned that hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped inside their homes in Mosul “are at extreme risk,” with dwinthroughout dling fuel, food and water and scarce electricity.
Iraq declared eastern Mosul “fully liberated” last month after three months of fierce fighting, but the militants have continued to stage attacks there, including two suicide bombings against government forces yesterday.
The battle for western Mosul promises to be even more daunting, as the half of the city west of the Tigris River has older, narrower streets and is still heavily populated.
Prime Minister Haider alabadi announced the start of the latest operation on state TV. Using the Arabic acronym for IS, he said government forces were moving to “liberate the people of Mosul from Daesh oppression and terrorism forever”.
Police units quickly entered the village of Athba, about three miles south-west of Mosul’s international airport, encountering only light resistance. Separately, the Iraqi Army’s 9th Division moved into the village of Bakhira, also southwest of the city.
The coalition has been providing close air support the four-monthold Mosul offensive and carried out nine airstrikes against IS near Mosul on Saturday, Central Command said. US special operations forces are embedded with some Iraqi units, and thousands of American soldiers are in Iraq to provide support.
Citing witnesses in western Mosul, the United Nations said nearly half of all food shops were closed and bakeries had shut down for lack of fuel and an inability to purchase costly flour. Prices of kerosene and cooking gas have rocketed, and many of the most destitute families are burning wood, furniture, plastic or rubbish for cooking and heating.
“The situation is distressing. People, right now, are in trouble,” said Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq. “We are hearing reports of parents struggling to feed their children and to heat their homes.”
Peter Hawkins, of the UN agency for children, said: “Three out of five people now depend on untreated water from wells for cooking and drinking as water systems and treatment plants have been damaged by fighting or run out of chlorine.”
The humanitarian agencies were gearing up to aid 250,000 to 400,000 civilians who may flee because of the fighting. The UN estimates 750,000 civilians may be left in western Mosul.
Lt Gen Stephen Townsend, a US commander in Iraq, said the Iraqi forces are an “increasingly capable, formidable and professional force”.
“Mosul would be a tough fight for any army in the world, and the Iraqi forces have risen to the challenge,” he said in a statement.
Iraqi forces drove IS from eastern Mosul last month, but the militants appear to have left behind sleeper cells to carry out attacks.
Brig Gen Yahya Rasool, an Iraqi military spokesman, said a suicide bomber struck a patrol of government-allied Sunni tribal fighters in the Zihoor neighbourhood, while another targeted Iraqi troops in Nabi Younis. IS claimed responsibility for both attacks.
So the Iraqi army has begun the push into west Mosul, the Islamic State’s last stronghold in the country. Yesterday Iraqi special forces began an operation involving thousands of soldiers and backed by air strikes from United States aircraft.
Iraqi forces retook the eastern side of the city last month but all the bridges across the Tigris have been destroyed and the move has got to come from forces in the West and not already in the city. The older part of Mosul has narrow streets and many buildings and as ever street fighting is likely to be intense, lengthy and very destructive.
Already there have been fears voiced for the civilians who are still trapped in the city with some reports saying it could be as many as 650,000, with 350,000 of those children. It does not look good for them. Last month the UN said that almost half of all the casualties in Mosul were civilians with at least 1,096 killed.
It will be a slow and terrible process, many will die, but Iraqi government forces with the support of the other nations helping them, will regain control of Iraq’s second biggest city. It will then take years to rebuild, but it will not be the end of the bloodshed.
In the past week there have been three suicide bomb attacks in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, killing at least 48 people. In the latest a car bomb went off in the Shia area of Bayaa in the south of the city. The attack was claimed by IS, saying it targeted “a gathering of Shias”.
This is perhaps a glimpse of what will lie ahead in both Iraq and Syria. Because the other major conquest for Islamic State was with- in the borders of Syria, and there too, with the massive help of Russia, particularly her airpower, Islamic State are also getting pushed back, with Aleppo almost falling and the assualt on the IS capital of Raqqa under way. The bizarre fundamentalists of IS can see they are being pushed back and they will lose their territories.
It looks like Islamic State will soon be without any land to call its own, as movements in Libya and Yemen are also going against them.
It has been suggested that the defining difference between IS and other Muslim terror organisations like Boko Haram is that IS’S sole reason for existence is that it believes in the establishment of the caliphate, and if that does not exist then neither will IS.
But the experience of Baghdad would suggest otherwise. It was also the experience in Afghanistan that after the west invaded the Taleban did begin an insurgency war.
President Donald Trump said yesterday, while addressing a rally in Florida, that a plan would be developed to “totally destroy” Islamic State. He did not of course go in to detail, but he did not make it clear which Islamic State was going to be destroyed, the one already being kicked off the land it had so brutally grabbed in pursuit of its goals, or the one that is certain to come after and strike from the shadows using suicide bombers, because a plan to eradicate that threat is the one we are going to need in the not-so-distant future.
Tragically that threat only gets greater as Islamic State get defeated in their strongholds in Syria and Iraq.