The Islamic State group on Thursday marked a year since its capture of Mosul with a film documenting the founding moment of the “caliphate” that triggered an international war.
A year after the fall of Iraq’s second city, an ever-broadening conflict was in full swing, with Islamic State franchises spreading across the region and Washington being drawn ever deeper into the quagmire.
The video glamorizes the assault the Muslim militant group launched in Iraq last year as an epic conquest, with previously unreleased footage of civilians welcoming the fighters and elated prisoners being freed.
The 29-minute production also documents the debacle of Iraq’s security forces last year and recounts Islamic State personnel’s surprise at how easily they took Mosul.
“It was unthinkable that the advance would be so much greater than was planned,” said the narrator of the video, which was published on social media.
He said the Islamic State had planned to take control of areas on one side of the city to launch a further push later, only to discover that the other bank of the Tigris “was empty of [Iraqi] soldiers before the men of the Islamic State arrived.”
The group’s offensive in Iraq began on June 9 last year. By the following day, Islamic State-led forces had overrun Mosul, a city of 2 million people.
The blitz led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and saw the collapse of multiple divisions in an army that the US had spent years and billion of dollars training and equipping.
Three years after ending its occupation of Iraq in 2011, Washington was back to training Iraqi troops as part of its effort to help Baghdad roll back territorial losses.
A year on, Islamic State — formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant — has displayed huge resilience, while Iraqi forces are still underperforming, leading to increasing questioning of the White House’s strategy.
US President Barack Obama on Wednesday approved the deployment of 450 troops to Anbar, a province whose capital, Ramadi, the militants seized last month.
Several officials in Anbar said Iraqi and foreign warplanes had bombed targets in and around Ramadi on Thursday.
Baghdad’s operations so far have focused on severing Islamic State supply lines in Anbar, which has a long border with regions of Syria that the militants also control.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has said a ground operation inside Ramadi was made too dangerous by the militant’s systematic use of huge truck bombs.
Iraqi Kurdish fighters made a push south of Kirkuk on Thursday on the back of air strikes against Islamic State fighters attempting to rebuild a car bomb facility after their largest such factory was leveled in a coalition strike last week, officers said.
Syrian Kurdish fighters also backed by coalition warplanes took the town of Suluk in northeastern Syria and advanced towards the Islamic State-held town of Tal Abyad, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
The monitoring group said fighters from the Kurdish People’s Protection Units “plan to lay siege to Tal Abyad,” which lies on the border with Turkey.
In southern Syria, a rebel alliance that includes groups supported by Washington seized most of a military airport in a province controlled by the regime, a spokesman said.
State television denied the claim, but both the Southern Front and the Observatory said the regime had lost most of Al-Thaala airport in Sweida Province.
They also said the rebels shot down a Syrian warplane.
State TV acknowledged that an aircraft had gone down and said an investigation was under way.
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