The Jim Bakker Show

Christian widow survives Islamic State for two years of fear

Zarifa Badoos Daddo (C), 77, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Erbil, Iraq. Zarifa was reunited with her family on Sunday after Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from the town of Qaraqosh, southeast of Mosul.

By Stephen Kalin

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – An elderly Christian widow who survived two years of Islamic State rule over her northern Iraqi town said the jihadists threatened to kill her, forced her to spit on a crucifix and made her stamp on an image of the Virgin Mary.

Zarifa Badoos Daddo, 77, was reunited with her family on Sunday after Iraqi forces drove Islamic State from Qaraqosh as they advanced on Mosul, the militants’ last major urban bastion in the country. The forces found her sheltering in a house they thought was abandoned or booby-trapped with explosives.

Most residents of Qaraqosh – Iraq’s largest Christian town – had fled toward the country’s autonomous Kurdish region more than two years ago as the jihadists approached, but Daddo stayed on with another elderly woman.

Her relatives had long feared she was dead.

Islamic State singled out religious minorities in northern Iraq, including Christians and Yazidis, for murder and eviction after declaring a caliphate in 2014 over territory they captured there and in neighboring Syria. Their seizure of Mosul and surrounding towns effectively drove Christians from the area for the first time in two millennia.

Daddo, who is hard of hearing, told Reuters on Sunday that the militants had not physically hurt her, but had intimidated and robbed her, made her desecrate her religion and tried to force her to convert to Islam.

“They told me to spit on the crucifix. I was crying inside but I couldn’t show it,” she said at a relative’s home in the Kurdish capital Erbil, an hour’s drive from Qaraqosh.

Then the jihadists demanded she stamp on an image of the Virgin Mary that she kept at home. “I said (to myself), ‘Oh Mariam, I will step on you but you know I don’t mean it’.”

Daddo, whose husband died in 2014, was reunited with her brother and other relatives in Erbil on Sunday. Her jubilant family slaughtered a lamb to celebrate what they consider the miracle of her survival.

The widow, with bushy gray eyebrows, decaying teeth, and a cross tattooed on the back of her wrist, sat with relatives who wept and applauded as she recounted her most harrowing encounters. She spoke in a mix of Arabic and Syriac, an ancient dialect of the Aramaic language which Jesus spoke.

Her niece said the family had lost touch with her about 18 months ago when Islamic State clamped down on telephones in areas under their control.

“We didn’t know anything about her. Anything could have happened.”

‘WHOLE WORLD IS HAPPY’

Most of Iraq’s Christian population is based in the north, around Mosul, which is one of the world’s oldest centers of Christianity, dating back to the first century AD.

A quarter of a century ago there were well over a million Christians in Iraq but their numbers dwindled during the 1990s as the country faced war and sanctions, and the exodus accelerated after waves of attacks on Christians in the sectarian violence following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Qaraqosh, about 20 km (13 miles) southeast of Mosul, was a Christian town of about 45,000 people before Islamic State swept across the region.

Daddo was sleeping in her garden when the jihadists entered the town in August 2014 and issued an ultimatum: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword.

She said she too had wanted to leave the town, but eventually lost hope. “I cried because I wondered where I would go,” she said. “There was nobody left in Qaraqosh. We had no neighbors, nobody. They all left.”

Islamic State provided her with enough food to survive, she said, but they also made surprise visits to the house which left her terrified.

“We were two women living by ourselves. They would come at night, sometimes they would come at four in the morning, so we were scared,” said Daddo, wearing a black cloak that covered her hair and a purple sash across her chest.

“They would say, ‘Sister don’t be scared, we are your brothers. You are one of us now.'”

The militants took all the valuables from her house. When she assured them there was nothing left for them to take, they threatened her: “They came back another day and said, ‘If you don’t give us your money, we will empty this machine gun in your chest.'”

Islamic State repeatedly tried to convert Daddo to Islam. At first, she argued. “I tried to tell them, ‘What is the difference between a Muslim and a Christian? We all worship God’.”

“My heart would race when they tried to get me to convert. They would try to get me to (say the Muslim declaration of faith). I told them I didn’t know how to say it, and I said it in reverse.”

Eventually, though, Daddo yielded: “I would say what they wanted. My life is dear to me so I said what I had to.”

Islamic State was driven out of Qaraqosh nine days ago. On Sunday, in a charred church, the Syriac Catholic Archbishop of Mosul celebrated mass in the town for the first time since its recapture.

Back in Erbil, perched on a couch under an image of the Last Supper, Daddo said she was relieved to be back with family and friends. “What do you expect? Wouldn’t you be happy? Now the whole world is happy.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Pravin Char)

Syrian rebels launch Aleppo counter-attack to break siege

Iraqi refugees that fled violence in Mosul ride a pick-up truck upon arrival in al-Kherbeh village, in Syria's northern Aleppo province.

By Ellen Francis and Angus McDowall

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels including jihadists began a counter-attack against the army and its allies on Friday aiming to break a weeks-long siege on eastern Aleppo, insurgents said.

The assault, employing heavy shelling and suicide car bombs, was mainly focused on the city’s western edge by rebels based outside Aleppo. It included Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, a former affiliate of al Qaeda previously known as the Nusra Front, and groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said more than 15 civilians had been killed and 100 wounded by rebel shelling of government-held western Aleppo. State media reported that five civilians were killed.

There were conflicting accounts of advances in areas on the city’s outskirts.

Aleppo, Syria’s biggest pre-war city, has become the main theater of conflict between President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Iran, Russia and Shi’ite militias, and Sunni rebels including groups supported by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.

The city has been divided for years between the government-held western sector and rebel-held east, which the army and its allies put under siege this summer and where they launched a new offensive in September that medics say has killed hundreds.

Photographs showed insurgents approaching Aleppo in tanks, armored vehicles, bulldozers, make-shift mine sweepers, pick-up trucks and on motorcycles, and showed a large column of smoke rising in the distance after an explosion.

Rebels said they had taken several positions from government forces and the Observatory said they had gained control over a checkpoint at a factory in southwest Aleppo and some other points nearby.

But a Syrian military source said the army and its allies had thwarted what he called “an extensive attack” on south and west Aleppo. A state television station reported that the army had destroyed four car bombs.

Abu Anas al-Shami, a member of the Fateh al-Sham media office, told Reuters from Syria the group had carried out two “martyrdom operations”, after which its fighters had gone in and had been able to “liberate a number of important areas”. A third such attack had been carried out by another Islamist group.

A senior official in the Levant Front, an FSA group, said: “There is a general call-up for anyone who can bear arms.”

“The preparatory shelling started this morning,” he added.

Heavy rebel bombardment, with more than 150 rockets and shells, struck southwestern districts, the Observatory said.

JIHADIST GROUPS

Fateh al-Sham played a big part in a rebel attack in July that managed to break the government siege on eastern Aleppo for several weeks before it was reimposed.

Abu Youssef al-Mouhajir, an official from the powerful Ahrar al-Sham Islamist group, said the extent of cooperation between the different rebel factions was unusual, and that the largest axis of attack was on the western edge of the city.

“This long axis disperses the enemy and it provides us with good cover in the sense that the enemy’s attacks are not focused,” he said.

The powerful role played by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, listed by many countries as a terrorist group, has complicated Western policy toward supporting the anti-Assad opposition.

The United States has prevented more powerful weapons such as anti-aircraft missiles from being supplied to rebels partly out of fear they could end up in jihadist hands.

The Syrian military source said Friday’s attack had been launched in coordination with Islamic State, a group against which all the other rebels, including Fateh al-Sham, have fought.

A tank for rebel fighters drives in Dahiyat al-Assad west Aleppo city, Syria October 28, 2016. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah

Islamic State fighters did clash with the Syrian army on Friday at a government-held airbase 37km (23 miles) east of Aleppo, next to territory the jihadist group already controls, the Observatory reported.

Syria’s civil war, now in its sixth year, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, displaced half the country’s pre-war population, dragged in regional and global powers and caused a refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe.

Mouhajir, the Ahrar al-Sham official, said cloudy weather was helping to reduce the aerial advantage enjoyed by the Syrian military and its Russian allies. Inside Aleppo, tyres were also burnt to create a smokescreen against air strikes.

Grad rockets were launched at Aleppo’s Nairab air base before the assault began said Zakaria Malahifji, head of the political office of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim rebel group, adding that it was going to be “a big battle”.

The Observatory also said that Grad surface-to-surface rockets had struck locations around the Hmeimim air base, near Latakia.

(Additional reporting by Tom Perry, Writing by Angus McDowall, Editing by Angus MacSwan/Tom Perry)

Iraqi army tries to reach site of IS executions south of Mosul

An Iraqi soldier stands next to detained men accused of being Islamic State fighters, at a check point in Qayyara, south of Mosul, Iraq

By Babak Dehghanpisheh and Stephen Kalin

SOUTH OF MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – The Iraqi army was trying on Thursday to reach a town south of Mosul where Islamic State has reportedly executed dozens to deter the population against any attempt to support the U.S.-led offensive on the jihadists’ last major city stronghold in Iraq.

Eleven days into what is expected to be the biggest ground offensive in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003, army and federal police units were fighting off sniper fire and suicide car bombs south of Hammam al-Alil, the site of the reported executions on the outskirts of Mosul, an Iraqi military spokesman said.

The militants shot dead dozens of prisoners there, most of them former members of the Iraqi police and army, taken from villages the group has been forced to abandon as the troops advanced, officials in the region said on Wednesday.

The executions were meant “to terrorize the others, those who are in Mosul in particular”, and also to get rid of the prisoners, said Abdul Rahman al-Waggaa, a member of the Nineveh provincial council. Some of the families of those executed are also held in Hammam al-Alil, he said.

U.N. human rights spokesman Rupert Colville on Tuesday said Islamic State fighters had reportedly killed scores of people around Mosul in the last week.

A Reuters correspondent met relatives of hostages south of Mosul. One of them was a policeman who had returned to see the family that he had left behind when his village fell under the militants’ control two years ago.

“I’m afraid they will keep pulling them back from village to village until they get to Mosul. And then they will disappear,” he said, asking not be identified to protect family members still in the hands of the fighters.

Islamic State fighters are keeping up their fierce defense of the southern approaches to Mosul, which has held up Iraqi troops there and forced an elite army unit east of the city to put a more rapid advance on hold.

ISLAMIC STATE

The fall of Mosul would mark Islamic State’s effective defeat in Iraq.

The city is many times bigger than any other that Islamic State has ever captured, and it was from its Grand Mosque in 2014 that the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a “caliphate” that also spans parts of Syria.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Tuesday an attack on Raqqa, Islamic State’s main stronghold in Syria, would start while the battle of Mosul is still unfolding. It was the first official suggestion that U.S.-backed forces in both countries could soon mount simultaneous operations to crush the self-proclaimed caliphate once and for all.

The front lines east and north of Mosul have moved much closer to the edges of the city than the southern front and the combat ahead is likely to get more deadly as 1.5 million residents remain in the city.

Worst-case U.N. forecasts see up to a million people being uprooted. U.N. aid agencies said the fighting had so far forced about 16,000 people to flee.

“Assessments have recorded a significant number of female-headed households, raising concerns around the detention or capture of men and boys,” the office of the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq said on Wednesday.

The coordinator, Lise Grande, told Reuters on Tuesday that a mass exodus could happen, maybe within the next few days.

It was also possible that Islamic State fighters could resort to “rudimentary chemical weapons” to hold back the impending assault, she said.

The militants are suspected to have set on a fire a sulfur plant south of Mosul last week, filling the air with toxic gasses that caused breathing problems for hundreds of civilians.

A senior U.S. official said about 50,000 Iraqi ground troops are taking part in the offensive, including a core force of 30,000 from the government’s armed forces, 10,000 Kurdish fighters and the remaining 10,000 from police and local volunteers. About 5,000 to 6,000 jihadists are dug in, according to Iraqi military estimates.

Roughly 5,000 U.S. troops are also in Iraq. More than 100 of them are embedded with Iraqi and Kurdish peshmerga forces advising commanders and helping coalition air power to hit targets. They are not deployed on front lines.

The warring sides are not giving casualty figures in their own ranks or among civilians, each claiming to have killed hundreds of enemy fighters.

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; editing by Giles Elgood)

Pakistani militants say they worked with Islamic State to attack police college

A man reads a newspaper's coverage of the attack on the Police Training College, at a newsstand in Quetta, Pakistan,

By Syed Raza Hassan and Saud Mehsud

QUETTA/DERA ISMAIL KHAN, Pakistan (Reuters) – A faction of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) cooperated with Islamic State this week in an attack on a police college that killed 63 people, the group’s spokesman told Reuters on Wednesday.

The confirmation of a link between the two groups will stoke fears that Islamic State, based in Syria and Iraq, is building a presence in Pakistan.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack in the city of Quetta and released photographs of the purported gunmen who killed cadets during a raid that lasted nearly five hours.

Pakistani authorities, who in September said they had crushed Islamic State’s efforts to enter Pakistan, pinned the blame on Al-Alami, a faction of LeJ.

Al-Alami spokesman Ali bin Sufyan told Reuters by instant message: “We have no direct link with Daesh (Islamic State), but we have done this attack together.”

He declined to give specifics, saying only: “We will provide help to anyone who asks against Pakistani security forces, and we will also accept help for this.”

ACCUSING INDIA

Provincial government spokesman Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar said the death toll from the attack had risen to 63, and that Islamic State’s claim of responsibility was “part of Indian design to malign Pakistan that this terror group has emerged in our soil”.

Pakistan has previously accused India of fomenting unrest in the province of Baluchistan, of which Quetta is the capital. A spokesman for India’s Foreign Ministry said: “We reject this baseless allegation completely.”

Concern has been growing in Pakistan that Islamic State will seek to exacerbate long-standing sectarian tensions that have flared up in recent years.

The Sunni Muslim LeJ has carried out some of the worst sectarian attacks in Pakistan’s history, including several major bombings in Quetta, and has often targeted the Shi’ite Hazara minority.

Analysts have long speculated that Islamic State would strike up a partnership with LeJ, even though the Pakistani group is affiliated with Islamic State’s rival, al Qaeda.

LeJ has claimed responsibility for a slew of attacks in Pakistan’s commercial capital Karachi, though officials doubt that all the claims are true.

In August, Pakistan announced a 5 million rupee ($48,000) reward for information leading to arrest of Syed Safdar, the head of al-Alami, who goes by the nom de guerre Yousuf Khorasani.

Hiji Behram Khan, father of Dilawar, a police cadet who was killed in Monday’s attack on the Police Training College, holds pictures of his son outside his home on the outskirts of Quetta, Pakistan, October 26, 2016. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro

INTERCEPTED CALLS

General Sher Afgun, a senior military commander in Baluchistan, told media that intercepted calls suggested the gunmen had received orders from across the border in Afghanistan.

Afghan officials have consistently denied sheltering anti-Pakistan militants, but the border is not fully under government control.

The Quetta attack has also reignited a debate in Pakistan about the need for authorities to target all militant groups, not only those who are actively fighting against the state.

Pakistan has for its part been accused of harboring leaders of the Afghan Taliban in Quetta as well as several militant groups opposed to the Indian government, something Islamabad denies.

Critics say that, by not stamping out radical groups and their ideologies, Pakistan is making itself a recruiting ground for Islamist militants.

“It may not be far off the mark to assume that militants in the country have assistance from across the borders. But this cannot change the fact that they essentially have roots within our own soil and that these have grown over the decades,” The News, an English-language newspaper, said in an editorial.

Dawn, another English-language newspaper, said: “Blaming sanctuaries across the border or even foreign support is a political game when strong action is called for.”

(Writing by Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

Islamic State claims attack on Pakistan police academy, 59 dead

By Gul Yusufzai

QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) – Middle East-based Islamic State on Tuesday said fighters loyal to their movement attacked a police training college in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta, in a raid that officials said killed 59 people and wounded more than 100.

Pakistani authorities have blamed another militant group, Lashkar-e-Janghvi, for the late-night siege, though the Islamic State claim included photographs of three alleged attackers.

Hundreds of trainees were stationed at the facility when masked gunmen stormed the college on the outskirts of Quetta late on Monday. Some cadets were taken hostage during the raid, which lasted nearly five hours. Most of the dead were cadets.

“Militants came directly into our barrack. They just barged in and started firing point-blank. We started screaming and running around in the barrack,” one police cadet who survived told media.

Other cadets spoke of jumping out of windows and cowering under beds as masked gunmen hunted them down. Video footage from inside one of the barracks showed blackened walls and rows of charred beds.

Islamic State’s Amaq news agency published the claim of responsibility, saying three IS fighters “used machine guns and grenades, then blew up their explosive vests in the crowd”.

Mir Sarfaraz Bugti, home minister of the province of Baluchistan, whose capital is Quetta, said the gunmen attacked a dormitory in the training facility, while cadets rested and slept.

“Two attackers blew up themselves, while a third one was shot in the head by security men,” Bugti said. Earlier, officials had said there were five to six gunmen.

A Reuters photographer at the scene said authorities carried out the body of a teenaged boy who they said was one of the attackers and had been shot dead by security forces.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Army chief General Raheel Sharif both traveled to Quetta after the attack and participated in a special security meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the prime minister’s office said.

One of the top military commanders in Baluchistan, General Sher Afgun, told media that calls intercepted between the attackers and their handlers suggested they were from the sectarian Sunni militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ).

“We came to know from the communication intercepts that there were three militants who were getting instructions from Afghanistan,” Afgun told media, adding that the Al Alami faction of LeJ was behind the attack.

LeJ, whose roots are in the heartland Punjab province, has a history of carrying out sectarian attacks in Baluchistan, particularly against the minority Hazara Shias. Pakistan has previously accused LeJ of colluding with al Qaeda.

Authorities launched a crackdown against LeJ last year, particularly in Punjab province. In a major blow to the organization, Malik Ishaq, the group’s leader, was killed in July 2015 alongside 13 members of the central leadership in what police say was a failed escape attempt.

“Two, three days ago we had intelligence reports of a possible attack in Quetta city, that is why security was beefed up in Quetta, but they struck at the police training college,” Sanaullah Zehri, chief minister of Baluchistan, told the Geo TV channel.

ISLAMIC STATE

Pakistan has improved its security situation in recent years but Islamist groups continue to pose a threat and stage major attacks in the mainly Muslim nation of 190 million.

Islamic State has sought to make inroads over the past year, hoping to exploit the country’s growing sectarian divisions.

Monday night’s assault on the police college was the deadliest in Pakistan since a suicide bomber killed 70 people in an attack on mourners gathered at a hospital in Quetta in August.

The August attack was claimed by IS, but also by a Pakistani Taliban faction, Jamaat-ur-Ahrar.

The military had dismissed previous Islamic State claims of responsibility and last month said it had crushed the Middle East-based group’s attempt to expand in Pakistan. It also dismissed previous IS claims of responsibility as ‘propaganda’.

A photograph of the three alleged attackers released by Islamic State showed one individual with a striking resemblance to the picture of a dead gunman taken by a policeman inside the college, and shared with Reuters.

Analysts say Islamic State clearly has a presence in Pakistan and there is growing evidence that some local groups are working with IS.

“The problem with this government is that it seems to be in a complete state of denial,” said Zahid Hussain, an Islamabad-based security analyst.

HIDING UNDER BEDS

Wounded cadets spoke of scurrying for cover after being woken by the sound of bullets.

“I was asleep, my friends were there as well, and we took cover under the beds,” one unidentified cadet told Geo TV. “My friends were shot, but I only received a (small) wound on my head.”

Another cadet said he did not have ammunition to fight back.

Officials said the attackers targeted the center’s hostel, where around 200 to 250 police recruits were resting. At least three explosions were reported at the scene by media.

Quetta has long been regarded as a base for the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership has regularly held meetings there.

Baluchistan is no stranger to violence, with separatist fighters launching regular attacks on security forces for nearly a decade and the military striking back.

Militants, particularly sectarian groups, have also launched a campaign of suicide bombings and assassinations of minority Shias.

Attacks are becoming rarer but security forces need to be more alert, Interior Minister Nisar Ali Khan warned.

“Our problem is that when an attack happens, we are alert for a week after, ten days later, until 20 days pass, (but) then it goes back to business as usual,” he said.

“We need to be alert all the time.”

(Additional reporting by Syed Raza Hassan in KARACHI, and Mehreen Zahra-Malik, Kay Johnson, Asad Hashim in ISLAMABAD, and Mohamed el Sherif in CAIRO; Writing by Kay Johnson, Mehreen Zahra-Malik, Drazen Jorgic; Editing by Catherine Evans and Clarence Fernandez)

Islamic State steps up counter-attacks as Mosul offensive enters second week

By Maher Chmaytelli and Stephen Kalin

BAGHDAD/BARTELLA, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State expanded its attacks on Monday against Iraqi army and Kurdish forces to relieve pressure on its militants confronting an offensive on Mosul, its last major urban stronghold in the country.

About 80 Islamic State-held villages and towns have been retaken in the first week of the offensive, bringing the Iraqi and Kurdish forces closer to the edge of the city itself – where the battle will be hardest fought.

The Mosul campaign, which aims to crush the Iraqi half of Islamic State’s declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria, may be the biggest battle yet in the 13 years of turmoil triggered by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and could require a massive humanitarian relief operation.

Some 1.5 million residents remain in the city and worst-case forecasts see up to a million being uprooted, according to the United Nations. U.N. aid agencies said the fighting has so far forced about 6,000 to flee their homes.

In a series of counter-attacks on far-flung targets across Iraq since Friday, Islamic State fighters have hit Kirkuk, the north’s main oil city, the town of Rutba that controls the road from Baghdad to Jordan and Syria, and Sinjar, a region west of Mosul inhabited by the persecuted Yazidi minority.

Yazidi provincial chief Mahma Xelil said the Sinjar attack was the most violent in the area in the last year.

He said at least 15 militants were killed in the two-hour battle and a number of their vehicles were destroyed, while the peshmerga suffered two wounded.

Islamic State said two peshmerga vehicles were destroyed and all those on board were killed.

Islamic State committed some of its worst atrocities in Sinjar when it swept through the Yazidi region two years ago, killing men, kidnapping children and enslaving women. Kurdish fighters took back the region a year ago.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions and who speak one of the Kurdish languages. They are considered infidels by the hardline Sunni Islamist militants.

REGIONAL INTERVENTION

The Iraqi force attacking Mosul is 30,000-strong, joined by U.S. special forces and under American, French and British air cover. The number of insurgents dug in the city is estimated at 5,000 to 6,000 by the Iraqi military.

The Mosul campaign has drawn in many regional players, highlighting how Iraq is being used as a platform for influence between rival parties – Sunni-ruled Turkey and its Gulf allies and Shi’ite Iran and its client Iraqi militias.

Turkey and Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated central government are at loggerheads about the presence of Turkish troops at a camp in northern Iraq, without approval from Baghdad’s Shi’ite-led government.

Ankara fears that Shi’ite militias, which have been accused of abuses against Sunni civilians elsewhere, will be used in the Mosul offensive. Turkey’s own presence in Iraq has also helped inflame sectarian passions.

It was from Mosul’s Grand Mosque that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate over parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014. Within a year his group was in retreat in Iraq, having lost the Sunni cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and Falluja.

The Iraqi army last week dislodged the insurgents from the main Christian region east of Mosul and its elite unit, the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) has pressed ahead with operations to clear more villages since Saturday.

CTS forces took three villages west of the Christian town of Bartella in an early morning attack on Monday and are now outside Bazwaia village, between five and seven km (three to four miles) east of Mosul, Lieutenant General Abdel Ghani al-Assadi told Reuters.

The region of Nineveh around Mosul is a mosaic of ethnic and religious groups – Arabs, Turkmen, Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, Sunnis, Shi’ites – with Sunni Arabs the overwhelming majority.

The army’s press office said a total of 78 villages and town have been recaptured between Oct. 17, when the Mosul operation started, and until Sunday evening.

More than 770 Islamic State fighters have been killed and 23 captured. One hundred and twenty-seven car bombs used in suicide attacks on advancing troops have been destroyed, according to an army statement.

Islamic State says it has killed hundreds of fighters from the attacking forces and blocked their progress.

The army is trying to advance from the south and the east while Kurdish peshmerga fighters are holding fronts in the east and north.

The distance from the frontlines to the built-up area of Mosul ranges from 40 kilometers (25 miles), in the south, to 5 kilometers at the closest, in the east.

After Islamic State’s attack on Friday in Kirkuk, the hardline Sunni militant group has launched other diversionary attacks in Sinjar and Rutba, 360 km west of Baghdad, where they killed at least seven policemen, according to security sources.

Federal police units arrived in Rutba overnight to back up the local forces, according to the sources who estimate that 16 insurgents have been killed so far. Islamic State said in an online statement that dozens of security force members and pro-government Sunni tribal forces had fled Rutba.

(Additional reporting by Saif Hameed; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Islamic State attacks Kirkuk as Iraqi forces push on Mosul

Peshmerga forces stand behind rocks at a site of an attack by Islamic State militants in Kirkuk, Iraq,

By Michael Georgy

QAYYARA, Iraq (Reuters) – Islamic State launched a major attack on the city of Kirkuk on Friday as Iraqi and Kurdish forces pursued operations to seize territory around Mosul in preparation for an offensive on the jihadists’ last major stronghold in Iraq.

Islamic State’s assault on Kirkuk, which lies in an oil- producing region, killed 18 members of the security forces and workers at a power station outside the city, including two Iranians, a hospital source said.

Crude oil production facilities were not targeted and the power supply continued uninterrupted in the city. Kirkuk is located east of Hawija, a pocket still under control of Islamic State that lies between Baghdad and Mosul.

With air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition, Iraqi government forces captured eight villages south and southeast of Mosul. Kurdish forces attacking from the north and east also captured several villages, according to statements from their respective military commands overnight.

The offensive that started on Monday to capture Mosul is expected to become the biggest battle fought in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

The United Nations says Mosul could require the biggest humanitarian relief operation in the world, with worst-case scenario forecasts of up to a million people being uprooted.

About 1.5 million residents are still believed to be inside Mosul. Islamic State has taken 550 families from villages around Mosul and is holding them close to IS locations in the city, probably as human shields, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office said in Geneva.

The fighting has forced 5,640 people to flee their homes so far from the vicinity of the city, the International Organization for Migration said late on Thursday.

The Turkish Red Crescent said it was sending aid trucks to northern Iraq with food and humanitarian supplies for 10,000 people displaced by fighting around Mosul.

EXPLOSIVE DEVICE

A U.S. service member died on Thursday from wounds sustained in an improvised explosive device blast near the city.

Roughly 5,000 U.S. forces are in Iraq. More than 100 of them are embedded with Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, advising commanders and helping them ensure coalition air power hits the right targets, officials say.

However, the Kurdish military command complained that air support wasn’t enough on Thursday.

“Regrettably a number of Peshmerga have paid the ultimate sacrifice for us to deliver today’s gains against ISIL. Further, Global Coalition warplane and support were not as decisive as in the past,” the Kurdish command said in a statement.

Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, addressing anti-Islamic State coalition allies meeting in Paris via video link, said the offensive was advancing more quickly than planned.

A senior Kurdish military official told Reuters the offensive by the Iraqi and Kurdish forces was moving steadily as they push into villages on the outskirts of Mosul.

But he expected the offensive to slow down once they approach the city itself, where Islamic State had built trenches, dug tunnels and might use civilians as human shields.

“I believe it will be more clear within the coming weeks once we get rid of those villages and we come closer to the city how quickly this war will end. If they (Islamic State) decide to defend the actual city then the process will slow down.”

Once inside Mosul, Iraqi special forces would have to go from street to street and from neighborhood to neighborhood to clear explosives and booby traps, the official said.

Islamic State denied that government forces had advanced. Under the headline “The crusade on Nineveh gets a lousy start,” the group’s weekly online magazine Al-Nabaa said it repelled assaults on all fronts, killing dozens in ambushes and suicide attacks and destroying dozens of vehicles including tanks.

In online statements, Islamic State said it launched a series of counter-attacks and four suicide bombings to take back villages that fell on Thursday to the army and the Kurds and that it had blocked all their fresh offensives.

Military vehicles of peshmerga forces are seen at a site of an attack by Islamic State militants in Kirkuk, Iraq, October 21, 2016. REUTERS/Ako Rasheed

HOLED UP

In Kirkuk, Islamic State attacked several police buildings and a power station in the early hours of Friday and some of the attackers remained holed up in a mosque and an abandoned hotel.

The militants also cut the road between the city and the power station 30 km (20 miles) to the north.

Several dozen took part in the assault, according to security sources who couldn’t confirm a claim by Islamic State that it had taken a Kurdish police officer hostage.

The assailants in Kirkuk came from outside the city, said the head of Iraq’s Special Forces, Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, speaking on a frontline east of Mosul.Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi reacted to the killing of the Iranian citizens in Kirkuk, saying these attacks are “the last breath of terrorists in Iraq”.

At least eight militants were killed, either by blowing themselves up or in clashes with the security forces, the sources said. Kurdish forces had dislodged the militants from all the police and public buildings they had seized before dawn, they said.

A Kurdish security personnel takes cover at a site of an attack by Islamic State militants in Kirkuk, Iraq, October 21, 2016. REUTERS/Ako Rasheed

MACHINE GUN

Kurdish NRT TV footage showed machine gun fire hitting a drab two-floor building that used to be a hotel, and cars burning in a nearby street.

Islamic State claimed the attacks in online statements, and authorities declared a curfew in the city where Kurdish forces were getting reinforcements.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters took control of Kirkuk in 2014, after the Iraqi army withdrew from the region, fleeing an Islamic State advance through northern and western Iraq.

On the frontline south of Mosul, thick black smoke lingered from oil wells that Islamic State torched to evade air surveillance, in the region of Qayyara.

The army and the U.S.-led coalition took back this region in August and are using its air base as a hub to support the offensive on Mosul.

“Long live Iraq, death to Daesh,” was painted on a wall near an army checkpoint there, referring to an Arabic acronym of Islamic State.

The army Humvees at the checkpoint carried Shi’ite flags, revealing that the soldiers of this unit belonged to Iraq’s majority community.

Flying Shi’ite flags in the predominantly Sunni region and the participation of the Popular Mobilization Force, a coalition of mostly Iranian-trained militias, in a support role to the army has raised concerns of sectarian violence and revenge killings during or after the battle.

The nation’s top Shi’ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, on Friday renewed a call to spare civilians.

“All those who are participating in the battle have to respect the humanitarian principles and refrain from seeking vengeance,” said a sermon delivered in Sistani’s name in the holy Shi’ite city of Kerbala by one of his representatives.

(Additional reporting by Michael Georgy near Qayyara, Stephen Kalin east of Mosul and Saif Hameed in Baghdad; editing by Giles Elgood)

Bunkers and booby-traps as Islamic State makes a stand in Libya

Fighters of Libyan forces allied with the U.N.-backed government gather at the eastern frontline of fighting with Islamic State militants, in Sirte, Libya

SIRTE, Libya (Reuters) – Sheltering in tunnels, improvised bunkers and rooms fortified by sand-filled fridges, Islamic State is holding out in the Libyan city of Sirte, defending itself with snipers, booby-traps and car bombs against pro-government forces.

After a six-month campaign of often fierce street fighting, Islamic State militants are surrounded in a district less than one-kilometer square, after hundreds of U.S. air strikes that began in August in support of Libyan forces.

The battle for Sirte, taken by Islamic State more than a year ago, may be over soon. But how the militants managed to survive may give insight into the kind of tactics they could use to defend other cities.

The fall of Sirte would mean the loss of the militant organization’s main stronghold outside Iraq and Syria just as a U.S.-led alliance supports Iraqi forces moving to retake the city of Mosul, its main base in Iraq.

Sirte fell to Islamic State as the militants profited from infighting among Libyan factions to gain territory, steadily taking the city and imposing their hardline vision on Muammar Gaddafi’s former home town.

A U.N.-backed government is now in Tripoli trying to unite Libya’s competing factions of armed brigades who once battled together to oust Gaddafi in 2011, but have since turned against one another.

Six months ago, powerful brigades from the nearby city of Misrata began a campaign to flush the militants out of Sirte, which posed a direct threat to their city.

In the early days of the battle, Misrata forces suffered heavy casualties from snipers. More than 500 Misrata fighters have been killed, many by gunshots as they pushed in from the city outskirts.

Fighting has ebbed and flowed along with casualties as Misrata forces slowly encircled the last districts under Islamic State control, leading militants to change to more hit-and-run tactics, car bombs and explosive devices.

Some Misrata commanders said progress had been slowed by snipers and explosive devices left behind, but also by a lack of weapons and hospital facilities, especially when heavy fighting led to casualties in double digits.

But U.S. air strikes since August have targeted car bombs and militant firing positions, allowing progress. Western special forces teams are advising on the ground as well as providing forward air controllers who guide air strikes.

“Each round of fighting has its own circumstances … and it’s difficult to predict when the battle will be over. But the end of Daesh will be very soon,” said Mohammad Ghasri, a spokesman for pro-government forces, using an Arabic name for Islamic State.

DIGGING IN

With Misrata forces closing around the city center midway through the campaign, militants at first appeared to be holed up in the Ouagadougou conference hall, a central complex once used by Gaddafi for African summits.

As U.S. air strikes intensified, militants pulled back into dense residential neighborhoods as the battle destroyed much of the city. But it has been a fighting withdrawal, taking a toll on Libyan forces.

At the end of August, 35 Misrata brigade fighters were killed as their forces moved forward several hundred meters among emptied residential blocks in neighborhood Number One, near the sea front.

Now with less than one square kilometer under their control, militants have the sea front on one side and Misrata forces all around them, controlling high ground over part of the 600 district and the Ghiza Bahriya area, witnesses said.

Abandoned houses have revealed some of their defenses: Household fridges packed with earth act as reinforcements, and bunkers dug under foundations offer protection from air strikes.

Last week, Misrata forces found improvised tunnels and a makeshift field hospital. A Reuters witness said that in one house graffiti on the walls indicated a quick escape route for the next fighter to use that hideout.

Improvised bombs made from fragmentation grenades and rocket shells are common traps. Garages often contain unexploded car bombs, a Reuters reporter on the ground said. Suicide belts are sometimes left behind by fleeing fighters.

Misrata forces have also been increasingly using tanks and heavily armored vehicles to approach buildings, blasting a way ahead before brigade fighters, some often in flip flops and jeans, make their way in to clear them.

On Thursday, five foreign captives – two Turks, two Indians and a Bangladeshi – were freed after fighting that killed 20 Islamic State militants. Losing captives may be a sign of the group coming under more pressure. But it also makes Misrata forces cautious.

“Sometimes the battle takes a long time because we face unexpected situations like civilians being detained,” Rida Issa, another spokesman said. “The battle is now in residential areas and that means tough, street-by-street fighting.”

How many militants are left in Sirte is unclear. At the start of the campaign, some estimates said as few as 600 fighters remained. Some commanders and militants may have already fled before Sirte was encircled, Misrata officials say.

That has raised the risk of guerrilla attacks. Already a suicide bomber has hit a field hospital outside the city. This week more roadside bombs were found near a field hospital and a helicopter landing area 5 km (3 miles) outside Sirte, witnesses said.

(Reporting by Ismail Zitouni and Ahmed Elumami in Tripoli; writing by Patrick Markey; editing by Giles Elgood)