Iraqi forces have won
some territorial gains in Mosul against Islamic State fighters after months of deadlock; they retook parts of the embattled city Saturday, a senior Iraqi official said.
MOSUL, Iraq — Iraqi forces have won a string of swift territorial gains in Mosul in the fight against the Islamic State group after months of slow progress, with a senior officer Saturday laying claim to a cluster of buildings inside Mosul University and another edge of a bridge.
Iraqi forces now control the eastern sides of three of the city’s five bridges that span the Tigris River connecting Mosul’s east to west.
Warplanes from the U.S.led coalition bombed the city’s bridges late last year in an effort to isolate militants in the city’s east by disrupting resupply routes.
At Mosul University, senior commanders said Iraqi forces had secured more than half of the campus Saturday amid stiff resistance, but clashes were ongoing.
Iraqi forces entered the university from the southeast Friday morning and by nightfall had secured a handful of buildings, Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil and Lt. Gen. Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi said on a tour of the university Saturday.
“We watched all the (ISIS) fighters gather in that building, so we blew it up,” said special forces Sgt. Maj. Haytham Ghani pointing to one of the blackened technical college buildings where charred desks could be seen inside. “You can still see some of their corpses.”
Thick clouds of black smoke rose from the middle of the sprawling complex Saturday morning. By afternoon, clashes had intensified with volleys of sniper and mortar fire targeting the advancing Iraqi forces.
Convoys of Iraqi Humvees snaked through the campus, pausing for artillery and airstrikes to clear snipers perched within classrooms, dormitories and behind the trees that line the campus streets.
ISIS fighters overran Mosul in the summer of 2014, announcing from there their self-styled “caliphate” after taking a large swath of Iraq and Syria in a lightning surge.
Access to the city’s central bank, a large taxable civilian population and nearby oil fields quickly made ISIS the world’s wealthiest terrorist group.
Yet even as a punishing campaign of U.S.-led coalition airstrikes has pushed the militants underground, ISIS leaders continued to use Mosul as a logistical hub for planning meetings.
If Mosul is recaptured by Iraqi forces, ISIS territory in Iraq that once stretched across a third of the country would be reduced to small pockets in the north and west that troops will likely be able to mop up relatively quickly.
The operation to retake Mosul from ISIS was launched in October. Since then Iraqi forces have slowly clawed back more than a third of the city.
ISIS has tight control of the city’s western half where Iraqi forces will likely encounter another wave of resistance. The west of the city is home to some 700,000 civilians.