Iraqi forces yesterday launched an assault to retake Mosul’s Old City and push out the Islamic State (IS) group, three years after the extremists seized the city and announced a “caliphate.”
“The army, counter-terrorism forces and federal police launched an attack on the Old City,” Iraqi Army Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir Yarallah said in a statement.
Staff Lieutenant General Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a senior commander with the Iraqi Special Operations Force, confirmed the “start of the assault on the Old City.”
Iraqi forces backed by airstrikes from a US-led coalition are pressing an offensive to retake the Old City on the west side of the city from the extremists.
“The initial airstrikes started at around midnight. The security forces started storming parts of the Old City at dawn,” an officer with Nineveh Operations Command said.
Machinegun fire crackled and plumes of smoke from missiles rose above the Old City.
However, across the Tigris River, on Mosul’s east bank, life went on almost as usual, with shoppers, students and workers pushing through traffic jams.
Taking back the Old City, a densely populated warren of narrow alleyways on the western side of Mosul, is crucial to recapturing the whole of the former IS bastion.
Iraqi forces launched the battle for Mosul in October last year, retaking the eastern part of the city in January and starting the operation for its western part the next month.
The UN on Friday said that IS militants might be holding civilians as human shields in the Old City.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees’ Iraq representative Bruno Geddo said the IS had been capturing civilians and forcing them into the Old City.
“More than 100,000 civilians may still be held in the Old City,” Geddo told reporters in Geneva.
“We know that ISIS moved them with them as they left... locations where the fighting was going on,” he said, using another acronym for the IS. “These civilians are basically held as human shields in the Old City.”
With virtually no food, water or electricity left in the area, the civilians are “living in an increasingly worsening situation of penury and panic,” he said. “They are surrounded by fighting on every side.”
Since the battle to retake Mosul began nine months ago, an estimated 862,000 people have been displaced from the city, although 195,000 have since returned, mainly to the liberated east of the city.
The extremists overran Mosul and swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
The fall of Mosul was the worst defeat that Iraqi forces suffered in the war with the IS and regaining it would cap a major turnaround for security forces, who broke and ran despite outnumbering the militants who attacked the city in 2014.
The Iraqi security forces have since recaptured much of the territory seized by the IS, including three cities, and have retaken most of Mosul, the fourth and largest.
The IS is also under pressure in its last Syrian stronghold, Raqa, where US-backed Kurdish-Arab forces have also been advancing in an offensive to retake the city.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS