Airstrikes fuel Mosul gains as Iraq pushes for quick victory
— Half a dozen units of Islamic State group fighters holed up in western Mosul began their morning radio checks at just after 4 a.m. It was still dark and Iraqi forces deployed a few blocks away were listen- ing in as they prepared an advance on the city’s al-Rifai neighborhood.
“Thirty, what’s new? ... 120, do you read me? What’s up?” the IS radio operator said, using Iraqi slang.
About 40 minutes later the first U.S.-led coalition airstrike hit as Iraqi forces pushed across a main road and began clearing the neigh- borhood’s narrow streets.
“We’re seeing at least two squirters at the impact site,” a member of the coalition force radioed back to the Iraqi troops in Australian-accented English, using a slang term for badly wounded IS fighters. Moments later the extremists were calling for doctors over their own radio network.
Over the next 12 hours, more than 10 coalition airstrikes hit al-Rifai’s eastern edge. Most targeted small teams of two or three IS fight- ers manning sniper rifles or machine guns so Iraq’s special forces units could advance on the ground.
Military operations like the one in al-Rifai this week are accelerating in Mosul as part of a drive to retake the handful of districts still under IS control before the holy month of Ramadan begins at the end of May. And despite recent allega- tions of increased civilian casualties, advances on the ground continue to be backed by heavy airstrikes and artillery.
Launched in mid-February, the fight for Mosul’s western sector has been marked by some of the most difficult fighting and catastrophic destruc tion yet in Iraq’s war against IS. The brutal- ity of the operation was high- lighted by a single incident just a month into the oper- ation — a U.S. airstrike on March 17 that killed more than 100 people sheltering in a home, residents and other witnesses told The Associated Press.
By contrast, Mosul’s eastern half was retaken in 100 days of fighting. While front lines stalled at times, the area was less densely populated, neighborhoods were more modern with wider streets allowing tanks and other armored vehicles greater freedom of movement and the area was never under siege, allowing many IS fight- ers to flee westward.
The number of civilians reportedly killed in coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria spiked to 1,800 in March, more than three times the number reported a month earlier, according to Airwars, a London-based group that tracks civilian deaths from coalition airstrikes. Official figures from the Pentagon, which is slower in confirming deaths, are far lower: It said last month that it has confirmed coalition airstrikes killed at least 352 civilians in Iraq and Syria combined since the campaign against IS started in 2014.
The March 17 incident sparked outrage in Iraq and beyond. The U.N. called on Iraq to conduct “an urgent review of tactics to ensure that the impact on civilians is reduced to an absolute minimum.”
The Pentagon is still investigating the incident but Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, said the munitions used by the U.S. that day should not have taken the entire building down, suggesting that militants may have deliberately gathered civilians there and planted other explosives.
An Iraqi officer overseeing the Mosul operation said that after the March 17 strike, he received orders to no longer target buildings with muni- tions. Instead airstrikes were directed to the streets and gardens beside IS locations. But the order lasted only a few days. Now, as Iraq’s army, special forces and mil- itarized police push to clear the last vestiges of western Mosul held by IS, the volume of airstrikes is the same as when the mission to retake western Mosul first began, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonym- ity in line with regulations.
A few blocks from the front-line advance, Faisa Muhammed, her children and grandchildren huddled Tuesday on the ground floor of their home. Car bombs, airstrikes and mortar attacks had already broken every window in their house. Their street had been declared liberated the day before but the fight was still so close that the force of nearby explosions filled their living room with dust and blew open the curtains they had pulled closed over the shattered window frames.
Muhammed said two air- strikes hit on either side of her home over the past week. One killed a single IS fighter in a neighboring garden and another killed a three-mem- ber sniper team on the roof of another house.
“If we hear only 10 explosions in a day, that’s very little,” she said as her grandchildren sat quietly even as the walls around them shook. When the whine of a mortar sounded overhead everyone mechanically plugged their ears with their fingers.
“This has become normal for the children,” Muhammed said.
Just over 3 square miles of western Mosul remains under IS control, but within that area is the Old City — congested, densely populated terrain that is expected to present some of the most difficult fighting and greatest danger to civilians.
Some 500,000 people have fled western Mosul since February and the United Nations warned another 200,000 may be forced to flee as the operation continues.