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February 24, 2017

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Iraqis seize ‘most of’ Mosul airport

IRAQI forces backed by the international coalition fought their way yesterday into a sprawling military base outside Mosul and onto the grounds of the city’s airport, taking control of the runway amid fierce exchanges of fire with Islamic State group militants.

The two-pronged advance is part of a major assault that started earlier this week to drive IS from the western half of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city

Iraqi federal police units, backed by regular army forces, entered the airport yesterday morning, according to two police officials who said heavy clashes were under way hours later with IS militants hunkered down inside several airport buildings.

The officials said coalition troops were with the advancing forces, though they didn’t specify the nationalities of the foreign forces.

Private broadcaster Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen aired live footage from the Mosul airport perimeter, showing a military helicopter buzzing overheard and firing at IS positions as gunfire rattled.

By early afternoon, federal police commander Major General Raid Shakir Jawdat told Iraqi state TV that his troops had control of “more than half” of the airport complex. Jawdat added that about 200 families were evacuated to safe areas in government-controlled areas.

Separately, Iraqi special forces have entered the Ghazlani military base, which lies next to the airport on the southern edge of the city, according to the spokesman of the Joint Military Operation Command, Brigadier General Yahya Rasool.

Rasool said heavy clashes were under way inside the base. He did not provide more details.

On Sunday, after weeks of preparations, Iraqi forces officially launched the operation to take Mosul’s western half, with the Iraqi regular army and federal police forces taking part in the initial push. Since then, the military says they have retaken some 120 square kilometers south of the city.

Yesterday marked the first time the Iraqi special forces, which played a key role in securing the eastern half of the city, joined the fight for western Mosul.

“The counter-terrorism forces will be an additional force, which will expedite the liberation of Mosul’s western side,” Rasool said.

Also yesterday, another counter-terrorism unit captured a key village southwest of Mosul from where Islamic State group snipers and shelling had been slowing the government offensive, Rasool said.

Another special forces officer said IS targeted the advancing troops with a suicide car bomb and dozens of bombs dropped from a drone. The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said his troops sustained at least a dozen casualties, but many were light injuries.

Making up for a lack of fighters, IS militants are increasingly relying on modified commercial drones to guide suicide car bombers to their targets and to launch small-scale air strikes on Iraqi forces.

Among those who fled the fighting was Hamad Khalaf, who walked out of Maamoun neighborhood south of Mosul along with his wife and four children as convoys of Iraqi vehicles passed by.

“There are many injured still inside,” said a dust-covered Khalaf of his neighborhood south of Mosul.

In January, Iraqi authorities declared the eastern half of Mosul “fully liberated” from IS. The battle for western Mosul, the extremist group’s last major urban bastion in Iraq, is expected to be most daunting yet.

The streets are older and narrower in the western section of the city, stretching west from the Tigris River that divides Mosul into the eastern and western half.

The dense urban environment will likely force Iraqi soldiers to leave the relative safety of their armored vehicles. The presence of up to 750,000 civilians also poses a challenge.

Mosul fell to IS in the summer of 2014, along with large swaths of northern and western Iraq. But the Sunni militant group has since consistently lost territory as the American-led coalition proved to be critical for Iraqi government efforts to claw back territory lost to the extremists.

IS has suffered losses in Syria as well. Turkish troops and Syrian opposition forces seized the center of the Islamic State-held town of al-Bab yesterday, breaking a weeks-long deadlock between the two sides at the periphery of the town, Turkey’s state news agency said. The northern Syrian town in Aleppo province is one of the militants’ last urban strongholds in Syria west of Raqqa, the Islamic State group’s de facto capital.




 

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