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Iraqi forces preparing advance on south Mosul

By John Davison and Dominic Evans

SOUTH OF MOSUL/BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi security forces are preparing to advance toward Mosul airport on the city’s southern edge to increase pressure on Islamic State militants fighting troops who breached their eastern defenses, officers said on Thursday.

The rapid response forces, part of a coalition seeking to crush the jihadists in the largest city under their control in Iraq or Syria, took the town of Hammam al-Alil, just over 15 km (10 miles) south of Mosul, on Monday.

Officers say they plan to resume their advance north, up the western bank of the Tigris River towards the city of 1.5 million people who have lived under the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamists for more than two years.

More than three weeks after the U.S.-backed campaign to retake Mosul was launched, the city is almost surrounded by the coalition of nearly 100,000 fighters. But troops have entered only a handful of neighborhoods in the east of the city.

“We need to put wider pressure on the enemy in different areas,” said Major-General Thamer al-Husseini, commander of the elite police unit which is run by the Shi’ite-controlled Interior Ministry.

He said operations would resume within two days.

Lieutenant-Colonel Dhiya Mizhir said the target was an area overlooking Mosul airport, which has been rendered unusable by Islamic State to prevent attackers using it as a staging post for their offensive.

Army officers told Reuters in September the militants had moved concrete blast walls onto the runway to prevent planes from landing there.

Satellite pictures released by intelligence firm Stratfor also showed they had dug deep trenches in the runways and destroyed buildings to ensure clear lines of sight for defenders and to prevent advancing forces from using hangars or other facilities.

On the southern front, security forces took cover behind a mound of earth and fired at Islamic State positions from armored gun turrets.

The village of Karama was mostly deserted apart from a handful of residents and a few dozen Iraqi forces. A cement factory they recaptured three days ago was battered by gunfire.

“They used car bombs as we moved in and this street was heavily mined, but the battle wasn’t hard,” said 19-year-old recruit Abdel Sattar.

NIMRUD RUINS

Separate forces advancing on the eastern side of the Tigris targeted two villages on Thursday on the edge of the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, a military statement said.

Troops from the Ninth Armoured Division took the village of Abbas Rajab, four km east of Nimrud, and raised the Iraqi flag.

The Iraqi government says Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State’s campaign to destroy symbols which the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous. It would be the first such site to be recaptured from Islamic State.

Counter terrorism forces and an armored division fighting in the east of the city have been battling to hold on to half a dozen districts they surged into a week ago.

They have been hit by waves of attacks by Islamic State units, including snipers, suicide bombers, assault fighters and mortar teams, who have used a network of tunnels under the city and civilian cover in the narrow streets to wear them down in lethal urban warfare.

Residents contacted by telephone on Thursday said aircraft from the U.S.-led coalition supporting the Iraqi forces were circling the skies above eastern Mosul. They heard the sound of heavy clashes, artillery and mortar fire.

The militants were hitting back, they said. “Daesh (Islamic State) fighters were firing mortar bombs from a garden next to us which they had taken from a Christian,” one person said.

“They were bombarding the Zahra neighborhood where the Iraqi forces are. The war planes hit back with small rockets and destroyed the mortar and killed three of them,” he said, adding he had moved his family to another district.

Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) forces have been fighting in Zahra for a week, sometimes gaining ground only to be pushed back on the defensive. A senior CTS officer said on Thursday the neighborhood was fully under control.

“I’m very happy. I can’t believe that we’re over this terrible nightmare,” said another resident who returned to Zahra after taking refuge outside the city. “But we’re still frightened that Daesh might return”.

“We need more attacks on the other neighborhoods to liberate them and drive Daesh further away.”

The militants, who have ruled Mosul with ruthless violence, displayed bodies of at least 20 people across the city in the last two days – five of them crucified at a road junction – saying they had been killed for trying to make contact with the attacking forces, residents have said.

The United Nations has warned of a possible exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the city. So far 45,000 have been displaced, the International Organization for Migration said on Thursday.

Those figures exclude the thousands of people forced to accompany Islamic State fighters as human shields on their retreat into Mosul from towns and villages around the city.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed; Editing by Angus MacSwan and David Stamp)

Crucifixions and vice patrols show Islamic State maintains Mosul grip

Little girl carrying bottled water in Iraqi village

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Islamic State militants fighting to hold on to their Mosul stronghold have displayed the crucified bodies of five people they said gave information to “the enemy”, and are back on the city streets policing the length of men’s beards, residents say

The five bodies were put on display at a road junction, a clear message to the city’s remaining 1.5 million residents that the ultra-hardline Islamists are still in charge, despite losing territory to the east of the city.

Thousands of Islamic State fighters have run Mosul, the largest city under their control in Iraq and neighboring Syria, since they conquered large parts of northern Iraq in 2014.

They are now battling a 100,000-strong coalition including Iraqi troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and mainly Shi’ite paramilitary groups, which has almost surrounded the city and has broken into eastern neighborhoods.

Residents contacted by telephone late on Tuesday said many parts of the city were calmer than they had been for days, allowing people to venture out to seek food, even in areas which have seen heavy fighting over the last week.

“I went out in my car for the first time since the start of the clashes in the eastern districts,” said one Mosul resident. “I saw some of the Hisba elements of Daesh (Islamic State) checking people’s beards and clothes and looking for smokers”.

Islamic State’s Hisba force is a morality police unit which imposes the Sunni jihadists’ interpretation of Islamic behavior. It forbids smoking, says women should be veiled and wear gloves, and bans men from Western-style dress including jeans and logos.

Hisba units patrol the city in specially marked vehicles.

“It looks like they want to prove their presence after they disappeared for the last 10 days, especially on the eastern bank,” the resident said.

Mosul is divided into two halves by the Tigris river running through its center. The eastern half, where elite Iraqi troops have broken through Islamic State defenses, has a more mixed population than the western, overwhelmingly Sunni Arab side, where Islamic State fighters are believed to be strongest.

CRUCIFIED CORPSES

The militants are putting up a fierce defense after their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, told them in a speech last week to remain loyal to their commanders and not to retreat in the “total war” with their enemies.

Iraqi military officials say they have sources inside the city, helping them identify Islamic State positions for targeting by the U.S.-led air coalition supporting the campaign, which is also backed by U.S. troops on the ground.

The gruesome public display of the bodies in east Mosul appeared to be a warning against other potential informers.

“I saw five corpses of young men which had been crucified at a road junction in east Mosul,” not far from districts which had seen heavy fighting, said another resident.

“The Daesh people hung the bodies out and said that these were agents passing news to the infidel forces and apostates,” he said referring to the Western allies backing the campaign and the Shi’ite-led government of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

In another sign of a clampdown on contact with the outside world, one retired policeman said Islamic State officials were trying to inspect SIM cards to check on all communications.

“I went to get my pension as usual, but the man at the office refused to give it to me unless I handed over my SIM card,” the 65-year-old man, who gave his name as Abu Ali, said. “These are the instructions from Daesh,” the man told him.

Many residents close to the fighting have said the scale of the clashes has been terrifying, with the sound of gunfire, mortar bombardments and air strikes echoing through the streets.

In the Zuhour district, still controlled by Islamic State on Mosul’s eastern bank, witnesses said that cars carrying mortars roamed the streets on Tuesday, but were not seen being fired – unlike in the previous two days.

The relative quiet may reflect a reduction in fighting since Iraq’s special forces first broke into eastern Mosul a week ago. They faced fierce resistance, and have not sought to any major advance since then.

One witness said traffic had almost returned to normal in most parts of eastern Mosul and markets were operating, albeit not as busy as before the start of military operations.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Islamic State brutality comes to light after military advance

Clothes of prisoners who were detained by Islamic State militants are seen in Hammam al-Ali, south of Mosul, during an operation to attack Islamic State militants in Mosul, Iraq

By Stephen Kalin

HAMMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq (Reuters) – From behind the curtains of his bedroom window, 29-year-old Riyad Ahmed would peer out at Islamic State fighters dragging civilians into a makeshift jail across the street and then sending them in the middle of the night to be executed.

The former English teacher from the town of Hammam al-Alil, south of the jihadists’ Mosul stronghold, recalls hearing victims’ cries of agony as he hid with dozens of neighbors in the shadow of one of the group’s detention centers.

“The devil himself would be astounded by Daesh’s methods of torture. It is beyond the imagination,” said Ahmed, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

Iraq’s army and federal police, participating in a U.S.-backed offensive launched last month to recapture the largest population center under the jihadists’ control, retook this area over the weekend.

As the forces advance, details of Islamic State’s brutality and growing desperation, which have trickled out of its self-proclaimed caliphate over the past two years, are being reinforced by first-hand accounts of residents.

Standing on the road between his house and the jail on Monday, Ahmed told Reuters that no part of Hammam al-Alil had been spared from the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamists’ violence.

In his street alone, he said six people he knew had been executed, including his father and a family of three that lived next door.

Aid organizations, local officials and Mosul residents have cited reports that Islamic State executed dozens of people in Hammam al-Alil and barracks nearby over the course of a week, on suspicion of planning rebellions in and around Mosul to aid the advancing troops.

Abdul Rahman al-Waggaa, a member of the Nineveh provincial council, told Reuters last month that most of the victims were former police and army members.

Islamic State had used the town’s agricultural college as “a killing field” for hundreds of people in the days before the Iraqi government advance, Ahmed said.

“They would torture them inside and then take them out of the neighborhood and either shoot them or slit their throats.”

Police backed up his accounts, but the road to the college was still lined with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on Monday, preventing Reuters from visiting.

The military says its forces at the complex have discovered the decapitated corpses of at least 100 civilians.

HIDING

The jail opposite Ahmed’s house was once the home of an army officer who fled Islamic State’s blitz across a third of Iraq’s territory in 2014. Its walls are covered in soot from a fire apparently set by fleeing fighters, but metal cages only slightly larger than an adult male are still intact.

Ahmed, who learned English when U.S. forces occupied Iraq for nine years after toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003, was delighted to speak to a foreign reporter after two years during which he feared he would be killed for using English.

“We have been living in hell, like zombies,” he said.

Residents still in Hammam al-Alil on Monday told how they packed into homes with nearly 100 other people each for days to avoid being forced to flee to Mosul as Islamic State retreated.

“They didn’t know we were here. We didn’t make a sound. No lights, no sound, no speaking at all,” said Ahmed.

His family had stored food to avoid going outside but everyone lost weight, he said. Using the bathroom was a challenge.

As the town’s remaining residents emerged from their homes on Monday, neighbors greeted each other for the first time in many days.

An army lieutenant, back in Hammam al-Alil after taking refuge on a mountain for more than a week following the escalation of executions of security personnel, said he witnessed Islamic State kill people in a nearby field.

Thousands of civilians, including many from villages further south who had been forced to serve as human shields for the jihadists, escaped to government camps over the weekend while others were forced deeper into Islamic State-held territory.

“If the forces had come just a few days later, we would be in Mosul now. Daesh wanted to take us,” said Ahmed.

Others were not so lucky.

Tariq, an engineering student, said he had barricaded himself inside his home with dozens of neighbors for four days before Islamic State fled, refusing fighters’ demands to leave with them.

At one point, he said, the fighters had donned army fatigues and managed to trick a few families into believing they were arriving Iraqi forces. When the civilians went out to greet them, Tariq said, they were executed.

“Even a one-year-old baby, they put a bullet in his head.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Angus MacSwan)

Islamic State abducts more than 200 near Mosul, retreats with thousands

A family fleeing fighting between the Islamic State and Iraqi army in Intisar disrict of eastern Mosul, make their way to safer territory, Iraq

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – Islamic State fighters abducted 295 former Iraqi Security Forces members near the militant stronghold of Mosul and also forced 1,500 families to retreat with them from Hammam al Alil town, the United Nations human rights organization said on Tuesday.

The abductions took place last week as Iraqi government forces, Kurdish peshmerga and Shi’ite militias backed by U.S.-led air strikes pushed an offensive to recapture Mosul from Islamic State.

“People forcibly moved or abducted, it appears, are either intended to be used as human shields or – depending on their perceived affiliations – killed,” said Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights.

About 100 of the former ISF officers were taken at around midnight on Nov. 3 from Mawaly village, which is about 20 km (12 miles) west of Mosul. A further 195 were abducted between Nov. 1 and Nov. 4 from villages in Tal Afar district.

The abducted families were being taken from their town to Mosul airport, Shamdasani said.

“The fate of these civilians is unknown for the moment,” she told a U.N. briefing in Geneva.

The United Nations also had information that at least 30 sheikhs were abducted in Sinjar district on Nov. 2 or Nov. 3 and taken to an unknown location. It was trying to verify a report that 18 of them had been killed on Nov. 4 in Tal Afar district, Shamdasani said.

The operation against Islamic State’s Iraqi stronghold has entered its fourth week and Iraqi forces have so far gained just a small foothold in Mosul.

The U.N. human rights office has sources on the ground but the information they are able to provide is “patchy”, Shamdasani said.

She could not confirm media reports of a mass grave being found but said it happened to be in the same agricultural college in Hammam al Alil where the U.N. reported the execution of 50 police officers last month.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Islamic State kills hundreds, seeks child recruits around Mosul

Displaced Iraqi girls are seen in Kokjali village near Mosul, during an operation against Islamic State militants, Iraq,

GENEVA, Nov 4 (Reuters) – Islamic State militants have killed hundreds of people, including 50 deserters and 180 former Iraqi government employees, around their stronghold of Mosul, U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said on Friday.

They also transported 1,600 people from the town of Hammam al-Alil to Tal Afar, possibly for use as human shields against air strikes, and told some they may be taken to Syria. They also took 150 families from Hammam al-Alil to Mosul on Wednesday.

Militants told residents of Hammam al-Alil that they must hand over their children, especially boys above the age of nine, in an apparent recruitment drive for child soldiers, she said.

IS militants were holding nearly 400 Kurdish, Yazidi and Shia women in Tal Afar, and had possibly killed up to 200 people in Mosul city, she said.

The U.N. also had reports of air strikes causing civilian deaths, including one on Wednesday evening that reportedly killed four women and injured 17 other civilians in the al Qudus neighbourhood in eastern Mosul.

(Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Catherine Evans)

Islamic State leader says ‘no retreat from Mosul assault’

Military vehicles of Iraqi army take part in an operation against Islamic State militants in Qaraqosh, near Mosul, Iraq,

By Stephen Kalin and Dominic Evans

KOKJALI/BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) – With Iraqi troops battling inside the Islamic State bastion of Mosul, the militants’ leader told his followers there could be no retreat in a “total war” against the forces arrayed against them.

Expressing confidence that his Islamic State fighters would prevail against Shi’ite Islam, Western “crusaders” and the Sunni “apostate” countries of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called on the jihadists to “wreak havoc”.

“This raging battle and total war, and the great jihad that the state of Islam is fighting today only increases our firm belief, God willing, and our conviction that all this is a prelude to victory,” Baghdadi said in an audio recording released online by supporters on Thursday.

Iraqi regular troops and special forces, Shi’ite militias, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and other groups backed by U.S.-led air strikes launched a campaign two weeks ago to retake Mosul.

Winning back the country’s second biggest city would mark the defeat of the Iraq wing of a crossborder caliphate which Baghdadi declared from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque two years ago. Islamic State also holds large parts of neighboring Syria.

In his first audio message released in nearly a year, Baghdadi called on the population of Mosul’s Nineveh province “not to weaken in the jihad” against the “enemies of God”.

He also called on the group’s suicide fighters to “turn the nights of the unbelievers into days, to wreak havoc in their land and make their blood flow as rivers”.

Addressing those who might consider fleeing, he said: “Know that the value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame.”

ROCKET FIRE

Shortly after Baghdadi’s speech was released at around 2 a.m., residents said heavy explosions shook eastern Mosul. One said the militants fired dozens of rockets toward the Intisar, Quds and Samah districts where soldiers have been closing in.

“We heard the sounds of rockets firing one after the other and saw them flashing through the air. The house was shaking and we were terrified, not knowing what was taking place.”

Fighters were on the street, unusually showing their faces, he said. “They were saying ‘We will fight till death. The caliph gave us a morale boost to fight the infidels’,” he said.

Another witness from the Hadba neighborhood of north Mosul said that Islamic State vehicles patrolled the area and blasted out Baghdadi’s speech, urging fighters to hold their positions.

Outside the city’s eastern limits, hundreds of civilians streamed away from the conflict, packed into cars, pickups and trucks, waving white flags and hooting horns. Cows and sheep also filled the road from Kokjali, on the eastern edge of Mosul.

Many were from Kokjali itself, which was cleared of Islamic State fighters by Iraq’s elite Counter Terrorism Service troops earlier this week.

Fleeing residents said there had been heavy mortar fire launched by retreating Islamic State fighters.

By mid-morning, a Reuters correspondent in the Kokjali district of the city saw smoke rising from inside Mosul but there were no sounds of fighting.

Lieutenant-General Talib Shaghati said CTS troops were on the edge of the eastern Karama, Intisar and Samah districts.

The exact location of Baghdadi, an Iraqi whose real name is Ibrahim al-Samarrai, is not clear. Reports have said he may be in Mosul itself, or in Islamic State-held land to the west of the city, close to the border with Syria.

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said intelligence suggested that Baghdadi had “vacated the scene”, but he did not say where the Islamic State leader might be.

The authenticity of the 31-minute-long recording could not be immediately verified, but the voice and style closely resembled those of previous speeches Baghdadi has delivered.

The recording appeared to be recent as it focused on the Mosul offensive, although he did not mention the city by name.

Mosul still has a population of 1.5 million people, much more than any of the other cities captured by Islamic State two years ago in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been advancing on Mosul for two weeks from the north, from the eastern Nineveh plains and up the Tigris river from the south.

The Hashid Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) forces of mainly Shi’ite militias joined the campaign on Saturday, launching an offensive to cut off any supply or escape to the west.

The leader of the Badr Organisation, the largest of the Popular Mobilisation militias, said his forces would cut off the main western supply route on Thursday, leaving Islamic State surrounded.

Brett McGurk, U.S. President Barack Obama’s counter-Islamic State envoy, said the Mosul campaign was ahead of schedule. “Iraqi forces enter eastern neighborhoods of Mosul this morning. New advances on all axes,” McGurk tweeted.

Senior Kurdish politician Hoshiyar Zebari said in a tweet that Islamic State blew up parts of a bridge linking the eastern and western sides of the city to try to prevent its fighters abandoning the eastern districts. Residents said there had been an explosion at the bridge but said the cause was not clear.

TARGETING TURKEY AND SAUDI

In a sectarian speech, Baghdadi called for attacks on both Turkey and Saudi Arabia, saying the Sunni countries had both sided with the enemy in a war he said was targeting Sunni Islam.

Islamic State fighters should “unleash the fire of their anger” on Turkish troops fighting them in Syria, and take the battle into Turkey.

“Turkey entered the zone of your operations, so attack it, destroy its security, and sow horror within it. Put it on your list of battlefields. Turkey entered the war with the Islamic State with cover and protection from Crusader jets,” he said referring to the U.S.-led air coalition.

Baghdadi also told his followers to launch “attack after attack” in Saudi Arabia, targeting security forces, government officials, members of the ruling Al Saud family and media outlets, for “siding with the infidel nations in the war on Islam and the Sunna (Sunni Muslims) in Iraq and Syria”.

Islamic State has been on the retreat since last year in both Iraq and Syria, in the face of a myriad of different forces seeking to crush the ultra-hardline group.

In addition to the forces marching on Mosul, it faces a broad range of foes in neighboring Syria. There it is fighting Turkish-backed Syrian rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad and U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters, as well as Russian- and Iranian-backed Syrian army units loyal to Assad and foreign Shi’ite militias.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Tolba and Mostafa Hashem in Cairo, and Maher Chmaytell and Saif Hameed in Baghdad; editing by David Stamp)

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)

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)