OBLITERATED
I.S. routed in Mosul after conflict that lasted longer than Battle of Stalingrad
THIS scene of devastation shows the price of victory against Islamic State yesterday after it was routed from Iraq’s second city in a battle lasting more than eight months.
A pall of smoke hung over the Old City where the corpses of IS fighters littered streets in which no buildings had been left intact.
Whole neighbourhoods were almost entirely razed in the fighting to recapture the city, which took longer than the notorious Battle of Stalingrad, one of the most ferocious conflicts of the Second World War. Iraqi troops mopping up the last pockets of resistance were visited by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who grabbed an Iraqi flag and draped it across his soldiers.
Troops danced on top of their tanks to patriotic music as nearby airstrikes blasted debris into the air.
In a statement, Mr al-Abadi’s office said: ‘The commander in chief of the armed forces al-Abadi arrived in the liberated city of Mosul and congratulated the heroic fighters and Iraqi people for the great victory.’
State television later showed Mr al-Abadi touring Mosul on foot alongside residents who have spent months caught in the middle of some of the fiercest house-to-house fighting of modern times.
Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon hailed the Iraqi army’s defeat of Daesh, as IS is also known.
He said Britain had played ‘a leading role in the coalition that had helped bring about the removal of the death cult from Mosul’.
Sir Michael added: ‘I congratulate Prime Minister Abadi and the Iraqi forces who have been fighting on the ground with great bravery against a brutal opponent.
‘Daesh has total disregard for innocent civilian life and we should welcome their defeat in a city that was ground zero for their so-called caliphate.
‘The RAF has struck more than 750 targets as part of the campaign to liberate Mosul – second only to the United States.’ But liberation has come at a cost. Last month, IS wiped the historic Grand al-Nuri Mosque and its distinctive leaning minaret from the skyline. It was at this
900-year-old mosque in 2014 that the group’s leader, abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared from the pulpit that he was the leader of a caliphate that straddled the borders of Iraq and syria.
Is held mosul for three years, but Iraqi forces, backed by Us-led air strikes supported by RaF jets, have been battling to retake the city since october 17 last year.
the vicious hand-to-hand fighting in the narrow alleys of the old city mirrors the air raids and close combat in the streets of stalingrad, which was invaded by the Germans on august 23, 1942, and partially occupied by them until their surrender, starving and demoralised, on February 2, 1943.
But as celebrations began in mosul yesterday, fighting continued in pockets near the militants’ last stand at the River tigris.
airstrikes and gunfire could still be heard in the narrow streets of the old city, where remaining pockets of Is fighters were barricaded in. thirty militants were killed trying to get away by swimming across the tigris.
the battle for mosul – the largest city to fall under Is control – killed thousands of civilians and displaced nearly one million people.
Islamic state had vowed on saturday to ‘fight to the death’ in the city. But its loss now means the group’s territory in Iraq has been reduced to mainly rural, desert areas west and south of the city.