Daring raid turns to deadly trap in Mosul
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,” Dauoud said, explaining he was able to get out only 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 raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning on the sprawling complex of municipal buildings in western Mosul along the Tigris River.
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 that the soldiers has 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-Islamic State coalition, hailed the advance in a statement posted to Twitter.
But by 11:00 a.m. clashes inside the compound had intensified and commanders behind the front were getting frantic radio calls for help. Three bulldozers had broken down trying to remove roadblocks, hundreds of troops were trapped and they needed reinforcements.
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 sidearm before speeding back to his base.
“All of a sudden (Islamic State fighters) began popping up everywhere,” he said, “they emerged from nowhere.”
Snipers began to fire down on Iraqi forces from the buildings above, and previously concealed suicide car bombs rammed their convoys. Ibrahim said he was trapped in the complex for hours as Islamic State fighters moved out from uncleared neighborhoods and cut the routes his forces used to enter.
Commanders said the hasty advances were intended to give them the element of surprise, but the blunder shows how Iraqi forces continue to struggle with conducting methodical urban operations under political and military pressure for a speedy wrap-up to the Mosul war.