Tough Isis resistance slows Mosul advance
IRAQ: To defend a few kilometres of unremarkable road in northern Iraq, the occasional factory and flyspeck hamlets and villages, the Islamic State militants seemed to spare no effort.
They loaded a Volkswagen with explosives and secreted remotedetonated bombs into the road’s median strip. They burned tyres and dug large tunnels in houses, to obscure their positions. They placed crude mortar launchers on the road’s shoulder, pointed in the direction of any approaching force.
The arsenal ultimately failed to protect the militants as thousands of Kurdish soldiers known as peshmerga swept down the road as part of a broader offensive to drive the militants out of Mosul. But it seemed to slow down the action yesterday, tying up a large contingent of Iraqi soldiers for the better part of the day as they tried to clear the road and surrounding villages of booby traps, a few wearying feet at a time.
There were still 20 gruelling kilometres left to travel before reaching the city’s outskirts.
The struggle for Mosul - which involves United States air power and an array of Iraqi ground forces - is the largest and most complex so far in the battle against Isis militants, who have been digging in for a fight.
Residents who have recently fled the area and Iraqi officials with contacts inside the city say Isis has been erecting concrete barricades and filling trenches with oil that can be set on fire to slow advancing forces.
‘‘It’s going to be a tough fight and a difficult fight,’’ President Barack Obama said yesterday. ‘‘It is Iraqis who are doing the fighting. And they are performing effectively and bravely, and taking on significant casualties. There will be ups and downs in this process, but my expectation is that ultimately it will be successful.’’
Despite the looming challenges, Iraqi and American officials have praised the early success of the operation and said that on its first day, the thousands of Kurdish and Iraqi army soldiers taking part had met their initial objectives. The offensive is a rare collaboration between the two forces, who answer to the frequently feuding governments in Baghdad and Irbil, the capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Yesterday, the Iraqi military’s 9th armoured division also said it had advanced, breaking into the district of Hamdaniya and besieging the Christian town of Qaraqosh, about 16km southeast of the outskirts of Mosul.
Iraqi army and police forces are also advancing from Qayyarah air base south of the city. Colonel Abdel Rahman al-Khazali, a spokesman for federal police, said his forces were 30km from Mosul.
But Kurdish commanders also said they had delayed a planned push toward the Isis-held town of Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul, for reasons that remained unclear. Several of the commanders blamed the Iraqi army, saying it had failed to immediately take up defensive positions in territory that was captured on Tuesday.
Brigadier General Haider alObeidi, an Iraqi special forces commander, said the Iraqi forces were ‘‘waiting for the peshmerga to finish their job’’.
Whatever the reason, the consequences of the delay were immediately apparent: Militants around Bashiqa repeatedly fired mortars at a peshmerga base, soldiers at the base said.
When it does come time to clear the town, the militants are likely to mount a more formidable defence than they did around the much smaller villages on Tuesday, according to Lieutenant Colonel Sanger Abubaker, the commander of a Kurdish support unit.
‘‘For sure, there will be resistance,’’ he said. The town, with its proximity to Mosul, ‘‘is important to them,’’ he added.
The determination of Isis fighters to hold territory came into sharp focus yesterday, on the stretch of road the Kurds had captured. Near the village of Sheikh Amir, parts of the two-lane road had been gutted by burrowed explosives. Mortar shells sat in a guardhouse outside the village, near smoldering tyres that had blackened a small field.
- Washington Post