Iraqis press toward Mosul, face questions about airstrike
BARTELLA, Iraq—US-backed Iraqi forces fought their way inside two villages Monday as they crept closer to Mosul a week into an offensive to retake the Islamic State-held city, but they also faced questions over a suspected airstrike on a mosque that killed 13 people.
Iraqi special forces shelled militant positions before dawn near Bartella, a historically Christian town east of Mosul that they had retaken last week.
With patriotic music blaring from loudspeakers on their Humvees, they then pushed into the village of Tob Zawa, about nine kilometers from Mosul, amid heavy clashes.
Until now, most of the fighting has been in largely uninhabited towns and villages, but the special forces found more than 70 civilians sheltering in Tob Zawa.
They will encounter many more civilians as they get closer to Mosul, still home to more than one million people.
Abdeljabar Antar, who had remained in Tob Zawa with his wife and four children, said the IS militants had included foreign fighters “who spoke languages I don’t know — Russians, Pakistanis.”
Forced activities
They had forced children to go to religious school and military training, and everyone had to attend prayers five times a day, he added.
In the days before the offensive, Antar said the village ran low on food and supplies, and that residents had to get permission from IS to leave.
“I hope life will return to the way it was before 2014,” he said, referring to the summer when IS militants swept across northern and central Iraq, capturing Mosul and surrounding towns.
The Iraqi Federal Police, a military-style force, pushed into a second village in the Shura district south of Mosul, where they fired a large anti-aircraft gun and rocketpropelled grenades.
They later appeared to have secured the village, a cluster of squat homes on a desert plain, and handed out water and other aid to civilians.
The US-led coalition said it had carried out six airstrikes Sunday near Mosul, destroying 19 fighting positions and 17 vehicles, as well as rocket and mortar launchers, artillery and tunnels.
Human Rights Watch called for an investigation into last week’s purported airstrike in northern Iraq that hit the women’s section of a Shiite mosque in the town of Daquq.
The strike happened amid a large Islamic State assault on nearby Kirkuk that appeared aimed at diverting attention from the fight for Mosul, Iraq’s secondlargest city.
80 deaths in two days
The IS attack on Kirkuk, 170 kilometers southeast of Mosul, lasted for two days and killed at least 80 people, mainly members of the Kurdish security forces that took control of the city in 2014 as Iraqi forces crumbled amid an IS advance. Human Rights Watch said Daquq’s residents believe Friday’s attack was an airstrike because of the extent of the destruction and because planes could be heard overhead. The New York-based group said at least 13 people were reported killed.
The coalition and the Iraqi military, which are waging the offensive, are the only parties known to be flying military aircraft over Iraq.
Col. John Dorrian, a US military spokesman, said the coalition had “definitively determined” it did not conduct the airstrike that killed civilians in Daquq and had shared its findings with the Iraqi government, which is doing its own investigation.