Iraqi forces on Sunday battled through booby-traps, sniper fire and suicide car bombs to tighten the noose around Mosul, while also hunting Islamic State group militants behind attacks elsewhere in the country.
Kurdish forces announced a new push at dawn on Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul, where about 10,000 fighters are engaged in a huge assault to take the Islamic State-held town.
Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the Peshmerga had requested and received Turkish military assistance.
“They [Peshmerga] asked for help from our soldiers at Bashiqa base. We are providing support with artillery, tanks and howitzers,” Yildirim told reporters in western Turkey on Sunday.
Ankara’s claim came a day after Baghdad turned down a suggestion by visiting US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter — who met Kurdish leader Massud Barzani on Sunday — that Turkey be given a part in the battle.
Launched on Monday last week, the assault aims to reclaim the last major Iraqi city under Islamic State control, dealing another setback to the extremists’ self-declared “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria.
Carter on Sunday said that the idea of simultaneous operations against Mosul and Raqa in Syria “has been part of our planning for quite a while.”
He also said that destroying the Islamic State group’s external operations capabilities was “our highest priority.”
The extremists on Friday staged a surprise assault on Iraq’s Kurdish-controlled city of Kirkuk, and two days later security forces were still tracking down Islamic State fighters there.
The dozens of attackers, including several suicide bombers, failed to seize key government buildings but sowed chaos in the large oil-rich and ethnically mixed city.
At least 51 Islamic State militants have been killed, including three more on Sunday, local security officials said.
At least 46 people, most of them in the security forces, were also killed in the raid and ensuing clashes, which had almost completely ceased by late on Sunday.
Life was returning to normal in some parts of Kirkuk, but security forces in southern neighborhoods were still hunting for several gunmen.
Islamic State militants also attacked Rutba, a remote town near the Jordanian border in the western province of Anbar, with five suicide car bombs, the area’s top army commander said on Sunday.
The attackers briefly seized the mayor’s office but security forces quickly regained the upper hand, he said.
The spectacular attack in Kirkuk, of a type observers warned could happen more often as the Islamic State group loses territory and reverts to a traditional insurgency, temporarily drew attention away from Mosul.
However, there was no sign it had any significant impact on the offensive to retake the city, Iraq’s largest military operation in years.
Tens of thousands of fighters, including Iraqi federal troops and Kurdish Peshmerga, are taking part in the assault.
Engaged on the northern and eastern fronts, the Peshmerga are expected to stop along a line at an average of 20km from the boundaries of the city proper.
“They are pretty much there,” a US military official said on Saturday, adding that the lines “will be solidified in the next day or two.”
The Peshmerga said they had secured eight villages near Bashiqa, an Islamic State-held town northeast of Mosul and one of the main Kurdish targets in the offensive.
Elite federal forces were also fighting to retake control of Qaraqosh just east of Mosul. It used to be Iraq’s largest Christian town.
Lieutenant General Stephen Townsend, commander of the US-led coalition, on Saturday said that Islamic State resistance was stiff.
“It’s pretty significant, we are talking about enemy indirect fire, multiple IEDs [improvised explosive devices], multiple VBIED [vehicle-borne IEDs] each day, even some anti-tank guided missiles,” he said in Baghdad.
Iraqi Kurdish and federal forces rarely release casualty figures, but hospitals behind Kurdish lines were overwhelmed by the number of wounded, a reporter said.
“We have a shortage of human resources, medical equipment, medicine and specialized doctors,” said Lawand Meran, a doctor at Erbil West hospital. “Soon, if we have 1,000 casualties, our capacity will not be enough.”
US military officials have revised their estimate slightly upward for the number of Islamic State fighters in and around Mosul.
They believe the extremists are defending Mosul, where the “caliphate” was proclaimed in June 2014, with 3,000 to 5,000 fighters inside the city and 1,000 to 2,000 in the outskirts.
There is deep concern for an estimated 1.2 million civilians still believed to be in the city.
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