On the Mosul front, a block-by-block fight against ISIS as civilians continue to suffer
A first-person account MOSUL, Iraq — Clambering onto a rooftop with a small group of soldiers from Iraq’s counterterrorism service, we scanned the Islamic State group’s stronghold in western Mosul as one of its armored car bombs maneuvered toward the front line.
Within minutes, there was an enormous explosion — a shoot of red flame and a funnel of black smoke that reached into the sky.
This time, at least, there were no friendly casualties. The Iraqi troops who were clawing their way forward in the streets below had piled enough debris ahead of them that the suicide driver was stopped short of his target. All over the city, you can see that kind of wreckage and ad hoc barriers, put up by both sides.
Every day, for weeks, the battle to take western Mosul from the Islamic State has looked like this: a block-by-block crawl as casualties mount.
The militants are contesting every move by the counterterrorism forces, and they are making full use of the hundreds of thousands of civilians still trapped in their strongholds.
“If the city was empty of civilians, we could have been done with our mission a long time ago,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab alSaadi, a senior commander with the counterterrorism service (CTS).
The plight of civilians appears to be worsening by the day, adding to commanders’ urgency to find some edge against the Islamic State here.
The militants’ basic strategy appears to be to focus much of their efforts on blunting the CTS attack, calculating that if they can stymie Iraq’s most experienced fighting force, the Iraqi government’s broader offensive will bog down. Now, the CTS is fighting on a southern front just to the west of Iraq’s federal police and other Interior Ministry troops.
Invitation to the front
Al-Saadi, a senior CTS commander, invited me to come with him to the front in his armored Humvee. We carefully navigated past the wreckage of car bombs and hastily constructed barriers made of sand or abandoned cars.
When we started the drive, there was a smattering of civilians, some of whom had marked their houses with white flags. By the time we got to the Tanak section of the city, civilians were nowhere to be seen. Tanak was no longer a neighborhood — it was terrain.
We got out of the vehicles in Tanak and entered an abandoned house with a small courtyard, where we encountered a small group of soldiers.
The Iraqi soldiers established a machine-gun position on the roof to provide covering fire for soldiers pressing the fight below.
None of this was lost on the Islamic State, which flew a reconnaissance drone over and sent a scout on a motorcycle to try to find the Iraqis’ position. Two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters could be seen flying in the distance.
For hours, the two sides traded machine-gun fire. Young soldiers lugged heavy canisters of ammunition to the rooftop.
An aide to al-Saadi, who used binoculars to monitor the fight and typed updates into the iPad, said that many of the Islamic State forces they had been battling were foreign fighters. From the bodies the Iraqis had recovered, he said, it appeared that many had not bathed in weeks.
“They don’t have a social life,” he said dismissively. “They just come here to fight and die.”
Airstrikes and snipers
Eventually, a U.S. airstrike was called in to quell some of the enemy resistance. An Iraqi machinegunner poured on the fire.
The Islamic State would not be silenced. A sniper fired a round toward the covered landing where the stairwell reached our rooftop.
It was a good guess: That is where the general’s aide and a few other journalists and I were sheltering. But we were low to the ground. The round was high and struck the back wall, missing our group.
A battalion commander in a nearby counterterrorism unit was not so lucky that day: He was shot in the chest by a sniper and died.