Tougher fight likely in Mosul’s west
Iraqis expect IS to bolster defense
MOSUL, Iraq — A crowd of Iraqi officers looked out at the Tigris River Friday from a balcony of Mosul's Nineveh International hotel. Just over three months ago, the men were some 28 miles away in a cluster of desert villages on the edge of Nineveh plain.
“Our message to the rest of Mosul's residents is that victory is near,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, on a celebratory tour after the city's east was declared largely liberated on Wednesday.
The progress of Iraqi forces, halting at first, sped up this month as they closed in on the river that roughly divides Mosul into eastern and western halves. But that momentum is unlikely to be sustained and the city's western half is poised to be a much tougher fight for the already fatigued forces.
When Sgt. Maj. Hussam Abdul-Latif pushed into Andalus on the morning of Jan. 16, he said the fight for the small neighborhood about a mile from the Tigris was nothing like his earlier battles in Mosul. This time, he said most IS fighters fled hours before his troops arrived.
Safwan Thanoon, an Andalus resident, said dozens of fighters sped off on motorcycles overnight.
“This morning, not a single man was left, just those two corpses,” he added, pointing to a mangled body of an IS fighter in the street and another inside the garden of a nearby house.
“If they had stayed here it would have made the battle very difficult,” said Sgt. Abdul-Latif, the special forces officer, explaining how when he first breached Mosul, a handful of snipers holed up within houses and using civilians as shields would slow his convoy, giving dozens of car bombs time to target the stalled forces. The defensive strategy inflicted high casualties and forced long pauses between pushes.
“When we enter the other bank, it will be like the operation beginning all over again,” Sgt. Abdul-Latif said. He expects to face another wave of wellplanned defenses and more heavily armed IS fighters.
Mosul's west is more densely populated and home to the city's oldest neighborhoods. The United Nations estimates some 750,000 people are still in the city's west, many of them residents of outlying villages that IS fighters led on forced marches up the Tigris River valley as they lost ground there.
Narrow, winding streets are also expected to pose a particular problem as Iraqi troops won't be able to largely fight from inside their vehicles like they did in the city's east.
“We don't have a strategy yet for these areas,” Maj. Gen. Sami al-Arithi said, referring to the older parts of Mosul. “For now our approach will be to just surround them and wait.”
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Martin said Mosul's older districts, some with roads only wide enough for foot traffic, make that part of the city a more “complicated environment.”
“West Mosul will be as tough as east Mosul, and from our view even tougher,” he said, in a phone interview from the main coalition base in Baghdad's green zone.
Retaking the Andalus neighborhood came on the heels of a string of advances in eastern Mosul. Within a few days Iraqi troops retook the city's university, the Nineveh International hotel and more than half dozen eastern neighborhoods.
Gen. Martin, the commander of coalition ground forces, credited the swift progress with greater coordination between Iraq's disparate security forces that allowed Iraqi ground troops to push back IS by launching coordinated attacks. “They're attacking the enemy from multiple directions and the enemy cannot react,” he said.
Iraqi ground forces largely credit their victories to thinning IS defenses and nighttime raids across front lines aimed at taking out key militant leadership.