Iraq raid turns into deadly trap
MOSUL, Iraq — Hours after Mosul’s municipal complex was declared liberated by the country’s top military commanders and U.S.-led coalition officials, the wounded began pouring into a small frontline clinic just a few hundred meters away.
“Daesh had everything planned,” said Hamza Dauoud of the Federal Police who helped rush his injured comrades out of a battered Humvee and onto stretchers in the garden of an abandoned building.
“As we first advanced there was no resistance (from the Islamic State group), but once we entered, they woke up,” Daoud said, explaining he was only able to get out by ramming through a makeshift roadblock. “We were stuck there, nothing could reach us. I barely escaped. The snipers hit my car twice but I never touched the brakes once,” he said.
Iraqi forces launched a daring nighttime raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning on the sprawling complex of municipal buildings in western Mosul along the Tigris River. Beginning just after midnight, Iraq’s emergency response division, an elite arm of the Federal Police, led the attack. Initially advancing some half dozen blocks past the front line in armored vehicles, but breaching the complex itself on foot.
After facing very little resistance, regular Federal Police units followed and by 6:30 a.m. an Iraqi flag had been hoisted above the tallest government building.
From the roof of an abandoned school acting as a forward base on the edge of Mosul’s Tayran neighborhood, Maj. Gen. Ali Alami said the Nineveh governorate complex burning on the horizon behind him was liberated and fully cleared.
He traced his troops’ advances on a tablet showing a satellite map of Mosul — boasting of their quick progress — but the markers showed the soldiers had just pushed up the two main roads leading to the complex and hadn’t cleared the dozens of tightly packed homes on either side.
Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Rasheed Yar Allah, who commands army operations in Nineveh province, praised the Federal Police as heroes, and Brett McGurk, the special envoy for the U.S.-led anti-IS coalition, hailed the advance in a statement posted to Twitter.
But by 11 a.m. clashes inside the compound had intensified and commanders behind the front were getting frantic radio calls for help.
Sgt. Azam Ibrahim of the Federal Police was one of the first to enter the complex, but he and most of his unit fled as the first wave of counterattacks intensified. In the confusion he dropped his side arm before speeding back to his base. “All of a sudden (IS fighters) began popping up everywhere,” he said. “They emerged from nowhere.”