Iraqis press toward Mosul, face questions on strike

BARTELLA, Iraq — U.S.-backed Iraqi forces fought their way inside two villages Monday as they crept closer to Mosul a week into an offensive to retake the Islamic State-held city, but they also faced questions over a suspected airstrike on a mosque that killed 13 people.

Iraqi special forces shelled militant positions before dawn near Bartella, a historically Christian town east of Mosul that they had retaken last week. With patriotic music blaring from loudspeakers on their Humvees, they then pushed into the village of Tob Zawa, about 5½ miles from Mosul, amid heavy clashes.

The Iraqi Federal Police, a military-style force, pushed into a second village in the Shura district south of Mosul, where they fired a large anti-aircraft gun and rocket-propelled grenades. They later appeared to have secured the village, a cluster of squat homes on a desert plain, and handed out water and other aid to civilians.

The U.S.-led coalition said it had carried out six airstrikes Sunday near Mosul, destroying 19 fighting positions and 17 vehicles, as well as rocket and mortar launchers, artillery and tunnels.

Human Rights Watch called for an investigation into last week’s purported airstrike in northern Iraq that hit the women’s section of a Shiite mosque in the town of Daquq.

The strike happened amid a large Islamic State assault on nearby Kirkuk that appeared aimed at diverting attention from the fight for Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city.

The ISIS attack on Kirkuk, 100 miles southeast of Mosul, lasted for two days and killed at least 80 people, mainly members of the Kurdish security forces that took control of the city in 2014 as Iraqi forces crumbled.

Human Rights Watch said Daquq’s residents believe Friday’s attack was an airstrike because planes could be heard overhead. The New York-based group said at least 13 people were reported killed.

The coalition and the Iraqi military, which are waging the offensive, are the only parties known to be flying military aircraft over Iraq.

Col. John Dorrian, a U.S. military spokesman, said the coalition had “definitively determined” it did not conduct the airstrike that killed civilians in Daquq and had shared its findings with the Iraqi government, which is doing its own investigation.