An ISIS-held town outside Mosul was stormed by Kurdish peshmerga troops today as Iraqi forces waged a tough urban war in the city's eastern suberbs.
The operation against the Iraqi stronghold has entered its fourth week. Despite limited advance in Iraq, fighters in Syria began an offensive targeting ISIS' base in the city of Raqqa.
An alliance of US-backed Kurdish and Arab groups launched the campaign for Raqqa, where ISIS has been dug in for nearly three years, with an assault on territory about 50km to the north which they have dubbed Euphrates Anger.
The battle for Raqqa will be every bit as challenging as the one for Mosul, with both cities carrying huge strategic and symbolic value to the jihadists and their self-declared caliphate covering territory in both Syria and Iraq.
The Iraqi operation, involving a 100,000-strong alliance of troops, security forces, Kurdish peshmerga and Shi'ite militias, backed by US-led air strikes and a global consensus against the jihadis, has so far gained just a small foothold in Mosul.
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The Raqqa campaign, launched amid a complex civil war in Syria which has divided world powers, is not coordinated with President Bashar al-Assad or the Syrian army. The Kurdish element of SDF groups fighting towards Raqqa also makes them an unlikely force to recapture the Arab city.
"It is difficult to put a time frame on the operation at present. The battle will not be easy," a Syrian Kurdish source told Reuters.
In Bashiqa, some 15km from Mosul, the first waves of a 2,000-strong peshmerga force entered the town on foot and in armored vehicles or Humvees.
Artillery earlier pounded the town, which lies on the Nineveh plains at the foot of a mountain.
"Our aim is to take control and clear out all the Daesh (ISIS) militants," Lieutenant-Colonel Safeen Rasoul told Reuters. "Our estimates are there are about 100 still left and 10 suicide cars."
ISIS fighters have sought to slow the offensive on their Mosul stronghold with waves of suicide car bomb attacks. Iraqi commanders say there have been 100 on the eastern front and 140 in the south.
A top Kurdish official told Reuters on Sunday that the jihadists had also deployed drones strapped with explosives, long-range artillery shells filled with chlorine gas and mustard gas and trained snipers.
In eastern districts of Mosul, which Iraqi special forces broke into last week, officers say jihadists melted into the population, ambushing and isolating troops in what the special forces spokesman called the world's "toughest urban warfare".
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Mosul, the largest ISIS-controlled city in either Iraq or Syria, has been held by the group since its fighters drove the army out of northern Iraq in June 2014. The campaign to retake it is the most complex military operation in Iraq since the 2003 US invasion which toppled Saddam Hussein.
Twin offensives on Raqqa and Mosul could bring to an end the self-styled caliphate declared by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque in 2014.
Baghdadi, whose whereabouts are unknown but who is believed to be in northern Iraq close to the Syrian border, has told his followers there can be no retreat in a "total war" with their enemies.
The militants in Mosul have been waging a fierce and brutal defense, although they have lost ground on all fronts outside the city itself.
To the south of Mosul, security forces said they had recaptured and secured the town of Hammam al-Alil from Islamic State fighters, who they said had kept thousands of residents as human shields as well as marching many others alongside retreating militants towards Mosul as cover from air strikes.
The United Nations has warned of a possible exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees from a city which is still home to up to 1.5 million people. So far 34,000 have been displaced, the International Organisation for Migration said.
Many of those still in Mosul feel trapped, including those in districts which the army entered last week.
"We still can't go out of our houses… mortars are falling continuously on the quarter," a resident of the Quds neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city told Reuters by telephone on Sunday.
Security forces on the southern front have continued their advance, reaching within four km of Mosul's airport, on the southern edge of the city and on the western bank of the Tigris River which runs through its centre.
To the north, a military statement said the army's Sixteenth Infantry Division had also recaptured the village of Bawiza and entered another area, Sada, on the city's northern limits, further tightening the circle of forces around Islamic State.
Shi'ite militias known as Popular Mobilisation forces are also fighting to the west of Mosul to seal the routes to the Islamic State-held town of Tal Afar and its territory in neighboring Syria, to prevent any retreat or reinforcement.
Additional reporting from Reuters.
