Kurdish Peshmerga forces are within five miles (eight kilometers) of Mosul, commanders said Sunday after days of fighting and sweeping territorial gains in the operation to free the key Iraqi city from ISIS control.
A coalition of 100,000 troops have been closing in on Mosul since Monday, liberating surrounding communities village by village and making quicker-than-expected gains.
Officials and analysts say that entering Mosul is likely to kick off intense street fighting as coalition forces try to retake what has become the cultural capital of ISIS’ envisaged caliphate, or Islamic state.
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‘Freed’ and then forgotten
Two Peshmerga factions linked up after surrounding the empty town of Bashiqa, about eight miles east of Mosul, with the support of coalition air power, the Peshmerga’s general command said in a statement Sunday.
They were able to cordon off eight villages in an area measuring approximately 100 square kilometers and secure a significant stretch of the Bashiqa-Mosul highway to limit ISIS’ freedom of movement, commanders said. Hours-long clashes left dozens of ISIS militants dead, they said.
But with the gains have come pockets of horrific losses. ISIS executed about 40 people who were celebrating the apparent liberation of their villages by Iraqi forces, a Mosul City Council official said Sunday, citing local sources. The executions were carried out in four villages — Kabiba, Hamdaniya, Mukhalat and al Jayef, according to the official. The executions were believed to have been carried out on Saturday.
The official said that although Iraqi troops passed through the village where the executions took place — near Nimrud, south of Mosul — they did not leave units behind to ensure that ISIS militants stayed out.
CNN has received several accounts of Iraqi forces “freeing” villages and moving on to the next offensive without keeping enough of a presence to ensure militants did not return.
These follow executions on Thursday and Friday, when ISIS militants rounded up and shot dead 284 men and boys, an Iraqi intelligence source told CNN. The reported massacres were a savage show of force as the coalition tightened its noose around Mosul.
CNN could not independently verify accounts of the executions.
Those killed Thursday and Friday were used as human shields against attacks forcing ISIS out of southern parts of Mosul, the source said, adding that the militant group had dumped the bodies in a mass grave at the defunct College of Agriculture in the city’s north.
The source asked for anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the media. CNN could not independently confirm the killings.
The executions raise questions over whether Christians should return to their hometowns, two of which were liberated this weekend after more than two years of ISIS rule.
Church bells ring
Lt. Gen. Riyad Jalal, commander of the Iraqi ground forces, told state-run al-Iraqiya TV Sunday that the town of Hamdaniya, also known as Qaraqosh, had been freed and that authorities were now in the process of bringing back local officials to reopen main public buildings and plan the repair of infrastructure.
Iraqi forces and a Christian paramilitary group entered the town earlier in the week and faced fierce resistance from ISIS fighters for several days. Forces on Thursday had pushed the militants into the town center, where they were pounded by coalition air strikes supporting the assault.
Lt. Gen. Qassim al-Maliki, commander of the Iraqi 9th armored division, said at least 50 ISIS militants were killed and much of their equipment destroyed in the assault. His forces now are cleansing the city from IEDs and sweeping buildings in case any ISIS militants might be hiding, he said.
A community of Christians who fled Hamdaniya and found refuge in Irbil celebrated Tuesday night as they heard coalition forces were on their way to free their hometown.
A few kilometers to the south, church bells rang out in a town Saturday for the first time since ISIS seized it more than two years ago, local networks reported. Iraq officials claimed that some 200 ISIS fighters were killed in the assault.
Defense secretary commends the Peshmerga
The coalition of 100,000 people pushing through Nineveh Province marks an extraordinary union of factions that have long stood on opposing sides in Iraq’s history, with Kurdish forces, Christians and Shia Muslims fighting alongside the majority Sunni Arabs.
Nineveh itself is the center of Iraq’s diversity and is home to Christians, Kurds, Yazidis, Turkmen, Sunnis and Shias alike.
The coalition vastly outnumbers its opponent. No more than 5,000 ISIS fighters are in Mosul, a US military official said, although the terror group’s supporters put the number at 7,000.
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter arrived in Irbil on Sunday to meet with Kurdistan Regional Government’s Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani.
“I’m here to commend you and your forces. I’m encouraged by what I see,” he said.
A unit of what appeared to be US special forces advisers entered ISIS territory with the very first armored convoy of Peshmerga last Monday, a CNN team observed, placing American forces at the front of the fight to retake Mosul.