FEBRUARY 2017

IRAQ today
Iraqi Forces expect tougher
fight in Mosul’s west
BY SUSANNAH GEORGE
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) _ A crowd of
Iraqi officers looked out at the Tigris
River from a balcony of Mosul’s
Nineveh International hotel. Just
over three months ago, the men were
some 45 kilometers (28 miles) away
in a cluster of desert villages on the
edge of Nineveh plain.
“Our message to the rest of Mosul’s
residents is that victory is near,’’
said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi,
on a celebratory tour after the city’s
east was declared largely liberated on
Wednesday.
The progress of Iraqi forces, halting
at first, sped up this month as they
closed in on the river that roughly divides
Mosul into eastern and western
halves. But that momentum is unlikely
to be sustained and the city’s western
half is poised to be a much tougher
fight for the already fatigued forces.
IS Defenses
When Sgt. Maj. Hussam Abdul-Latif
pushed into Andalus on the morning
of Jan. 16, he said the fight for
the small neighborhood about a kilometer
from the Tigris was nothing
like his earlier battles in Mosul. This
time, he said most IS fighters here
fled hours before his troops arrived.
Safwan Thanoon, an Andalus
resident, said dozens of fighters sped
off on motorcycles overnight.
“This morning, not a single man
was left, just those two corpses,’’ he
added, pointing to a mangled body
of an IS fighter in the street and another
inside the garden of a nearby
house.
“If they had stayed here it would
have made the battle very difficult,’’
said Abdul-Latif, the special forces
officer, explaining how when he first
breached Mosul, a handful of snipers
holed up within houses and using civilians
as shields would slow his convoy,
giving dozens of car bombs time to
target the stalled forces. The defensive
strategy inflicted high casualties and
forced long pauses between pushes.
“When we enter the other bank,
it will be like the operation beginning
all over again,’’ Abdul-Latif
said. He expects to face another
wave of well-planned defenses and
more heavily armed IS fighters.
“Complicated Environment’’
Mosul’s west is more densely populated
and home to the city’s oldest
neighborhoods. The United Nations
estimates some 750,000 people are
still in the city’s west, many of them
residents of outlying villages that IS
fighters led on forced marches up
the Tigris River valley as they lost
ground there.
Narrow, winding streets are also
expected to pose a particular problem
as Iraqi troops won’t be able to
largely fight from inside their vehicles
like they did in the city’s east.
“We don’t have a strategy yet
for these areas,’’ Maj. Gen. Sami
al-Arithi said, referring to the older
parts of Mosul. “For now our approach
will be to just surround them
and wait.’’
U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph
Martin, said Mosul’s older districts,
some with roads only wide enough
for foot traffic, make that part of the
city a more “complicated environment.’’
“West Mosul will be as tough as
east Mosul, and from our view even
tougher,’’ he said, in a phone interview
from the main coalition base in
Baghdad’s green zone.
Momentum
Retaking the Andalus neighborhood
came on the heels of a string of advances
in eastern Mosul. Within a
few days Iraqi troops retook the city’s
university, the Nineveh International
hotel and more than half dozen
eastern neighborhoods.
Maj. Gen. Joseph Martin, the
commander of coalition ground forces,
credited the swift progress with
greater coordination between Iraq’s
disparate security forces that allowed
Iraqi ground troops to push back IS
by launching coordinated attacks.
“They’re attacking the enemy
from multiple directions and the enemy
cannot react,’’ he said.
However, Iraqi ground forces
largely credit their victories to thinning
IS defenses and nighttime raids
across front lines aimed at taking out
key local militant leadership. Iraq’s
special forces first began carrying
out such raids in Fallujah with close
coalition support. In Mosul, as progress
stalled, coalition forces moved
Nineveh International hotel
deeper into the city in part to aid in
the nighttime operations, according
to an Iraqi officer who spoke on condition
of anonymity as he was not
authorized to brief the press.
After U.S.-led coalition airstrikes
partially destroyed all five bridges
spanning the Tigris, the number
of car bombs targeting the troops
decreased and they became less sophisticated.
Iraqi troops began seeing
fewer of the heavily armored car
bombs that coalition officials likened
to vehicles out of the Mad Max movie
franchise. IS fighters also began
running out of supplies.
As troops pushed closer to the
Tigris, special forces Lt. Gen. Abdul-
Wahab al-Saadi reported finding
fewer and fewer weapons stockpiles
left behind in the houses once used by
IS fighters as bases, suggesting fighters
were running low on munitions.
Humanitarian Concerns
But the cordon of Mosul’s east that
partially accelerated Iraqi gains there
also punished the civilian population
and threats of a prolonged siege of
the city’s west are already worrying
aid groups.
Mustafa Muahmmad’s brother is
stuck in western Mosul and every few
days he’s able to get a phone call or
text message from him. His brother
told him water and electricity are
intermittent and food prices have
soared as the wealthiest residents
stockpile everything they can.
“They are all just huddled in the
basement,’’ said Muhammad of his
brother and his young family.
“At the beginning (of the operation)
they were afraid for us,’’ he said,
“and now we are afraid for them.’’
Some aid groups have already
begun drafting contingency plans to
airdrop humanitarian supplies into
the city, according to a senior western
diplomat present at military planning
meetings. The diplomat did not have
clearance to brief the press and so
spoke on condition of anonymity.
Re-Burying Their Dead
Like many families who lost loved
ones during the Mosul operation, it
was too dangerous for Faris Danoon
to travel to his neighborhood’s graveyard
after a mortar attack killed his
son Younis
“All the roads were blocked,’’
he said, explaining he was forced to
bury the 10-year-old boy in a garden
beside his home. “His mother
can’t bear it, she is just crying all the
time,’’ he said.
As security improves in the city,
more and more families could be
seen exhuming relatives who they
had given makeshift burials amid
clashes and reburying them in proper
cemeteries.
The Nineveh governorate estimates
more than 5,000 civilians have
been killed and injured inside Mosul
since the operation to retake the city
began. Hospitals in neighboring Irbil
report treating 1,587 civilians,
according to data collected by the
United Nations. But that number
doesn’t include civilians who have
died inside Mosul or those injured
and treated within the city.
Iraqi troops have also experienced
similarly high casualty rates;
Irbil hospital officials and Iraqi medics
working inside Mosul estimate
that more than 1,600 Iraqi troops
have been injured or killed during
the Mosul operation. The number
excludes Kurdish forces known as
the peshmerga who participated in
the initial stages of the fight.
Special forces private Sahil Najim,
a 37 year-old from Wasit province in
southern Iraq, said in his company
alone, more than 30 men have been
killed in the last three months.
“This is our duty,’’ Najim said, “so
of course it is worth it. But we still
feel sorrow, how could you not?’’
FEBRUARY 2017 CHALDEAN NEWS 11