A schizophrenic battle in Iraq
Kurdish troops aim to trap Islamic State fighters. U.S. soldier is slain in roadside blast.
NAWARAN, Iraq — The rocket flew low, kicking up dust before it smacked the ground in a fiery bloom just as the Islamic State suicide bomber gunned his car toward the Iraqi Kurdish fighters.
Moments before, the Kurdish troops, known as peshmerga, had languidly milled around a clump of Humvees and armored trucks. But now it was all about speed: Drivers veered away from the speeding car; others scattered for whatever cover they could find.
Suddenly the car bomb exploded in a fireball crowned with a plume of black smoke, and the earth shook. Though dazed, the peshmerga recovered fast, dispatching a wounded comrade into an ambulance. Then all was calm once again.
It has fallen on the peshmerga to secure areas east and north of the Iraqi city of Mosul, Islamic State’s de facto capital and the heart of its once seemingly unstoppable caliphate, even as other Iraqi security forces advanced from the south.
In the early hours Thursday, four days into the longanticipated campaign to take back the city, thousands of the Kurdish warriors gathered at three sites across the mountain ranges to Mosul’s north.
Their aim was to take 27 villages and deny the jihadists access to areas they once traversed with nearimpunity, according to the peshmerga’s general command .
Yet despite reports of rapid advances in the opening moves of the Mosul offensive, this was no thunder run. What emerged instead was a battle of fits and starts.
Even before a column of dozens of Kurdish armored vehicles, trucks and tanks threaded its way in the fields between the villages here, Islamic State launched two fixed-wing drones, one that was shot down by a burst of gunfire so intense it sounded like a drumroll.
Meanwhile, artillery and warplanes from the U.S.-led coalition pummeled jihadist positions before advancing security forces encircled some of the villages, firing on anything that moved. Islamic State militants, though outnumbered, hid between buildings to lob mortar shells and rockets, shot at soldiers or dispatch car bombs.
“We have to clean this area…. We’re used to fighting Daesh and know their strategy,” said Gen Aziz Waisy, commander of the Kurdish Zeravani Special Forces, which spearheaded the attack from Mt. Nawaran, about 14 miles northeast of Mosul. Daesh is Islamic State’s Arabic acronym.
The general, emerging from a Humvee that had taken advantage of a lull in the fighting to move up the column, said this was the closest his units had gotten to the city.
“We’re very motivated. We know that Daesh is an enemy we have to destroy,” he said.
In a vehicle nearby, one veteran fighter, 34-year-old Sadeq Raouf, sang popular Kurdish tunes and cracked jokes as small arms fire crackled and mortar shells dropped nearby at the rate of once a minute. Raouf and his colleague, a young fighter named Fakhr Din, would stop occasionally to fire their M-16s at buildings where they suspected the militants were bunkered.
Later in the battle, Humvees and technicals established a perimeter, allowing bulldozers to create a berm to impede car bombers from approaching.
Even here, the schizophrenic nature of the battle could be seen: One commander, a blue disposable razor poised before his face, squinted into a silverframed mirror propped on his armored vehicle. He took one cautious swipe when the high-pitched whine of an incoming mortar shell drowned out the sounds of outgoing gunfire. It fell less than 10 yards away. He then continued to shave.
Yet there were losses in Thursday’s operation. A visiting reporter saw two peshmerga fighters evacuated from the front line, one with severe head injuries. Local media spoke of at least five killed and others wounded.
The Pentagon said Thursday that a U.S. service member was killed in a roadside bomb blast.
The soldier had been assisting in the Mosul offensive, making him the first American casualty in the campaign, which has incorporated more than 5,000 U.S. troops who are officially acting in an “advise and assist” capacity to the various fighting groups in Iraq.
U.S. and British special forces units, however, have taken a more active role.
Officials would not comment on whether the soldier was embedded with the peshmerga or other Iraqi security forces.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s elite special forces units mounted their own offensive in nearby Bartella, a Christian town just 13 miles east of Mosul, which Lt. Gen. Talib Shaghati, a senior commander with the counterterrorism forces, said was a “main defensive line” in front of the advancing troops.
“I declare to the families of Bartella and Mosul that we have achieved full control of the town of Bartella,” Shaghati said in a news conference Thursday evening. Soldiers nearby, however,
said that pockets of Islamic State fighters remained and that there was still a risk of car bombs.
Disparate gunfire could be heard in the outskirts late Thursday, and one special forces operative had to be evacuated.
The town, which was overrun by the jihadists in late 2014 during their blitz campaign to take large swaths of the Nineveh plains, was said to be deserted, Shaghati said. Many of its residents had escaped to the city of Irbil in the days after its capture.
“The fall of this town in our hands means we are ready for Mosul. We give tidings to our people in Mosul that we are on the way,” Shaghati said.
He insisted casualties on the government side had been minimal while more than 15 vehicles used by car bombers had been destroyed. Amaq, a news agency affiliated with Islamic State, reported Thursday that “six martyrdom operations” struck government forces in Bartella, a reference to the suicide attacks.