IRAQI paramilitary forces battled the Islamic State group southwest of Mosul on Sunday, the second day of an operation to cut jihadist supply lines between the city and neighbouring Syria.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters have been advancing on Mosul from the north, east and south after the launch on October 17 of a vast offensive to retake ISIS’s last stronghold in the country.
After standing largely on the sidelines in the first days of the assault, forces from the Hashed al-Shaabi, a paramilitary umbrella organisation dominated by Iran-backed Shiite militias, began a push on Saturday towards the west of Mosul.
The ultimate aim is the recapture of Tal Afar, a town west of the city, and the cutting of jihadist supply lines between Mosul and Syria, but the Hashed still has significant ground to cover.
In a series of statements on Sunday, the Hashed’s media office said it had retaken two villages, cleared another area and entered several more. Al-Imraini, one of the two villages the Hashed said it recaptured, is 45 kilometres (27 miles) from Tal Afar, according to the media office.
The drive toward Tal Afar could bring the fighting perilously close to the ancient city of Hatra, a UNESCO world heritage site, and the ruins of Nimrud – two archeological sites that have previously been vandalised by ISIS. The involvement of Shiite militias in the Mosul operation has been a source of contention, though the Hashed’s top commanders insist they do not plan to enter the largely Sunni city.
Iraqi Kurds and Sunni Arab politicians have opposed their involvement, as has Turkey which has a military presence east of Mosul despite repeated demands by Baghdad for the forces to be withdrawn. Relations between the Hashed and the US-led coalition fighting ISIS are also tense, but the paramilitaries enjoy widespread support among members of Iraq’s Shiite majority.
The Hashed has been a key force in Iraq’s campaign to retake areas seized by ISIS in mid-2014, when the jihadists took control of large parts of Syria and Iraq and declared a cross-border ‘caliphate’. Tal Afar was a Shiite-majority town of mostly ethnic Turkmens before the Sunni extremists of IS overran it in 2014, and its recapture is a main goal of Shiite militia forces.
The Sunday fighting came a day after Iraq announced the recapture of Al-Shura, an area south of Mosul with a long history as a militant bastion that has been the target of fighting for more than a week. Iraq’s Joint Operations Command announced ‘the complete liberation of Al-Shura,’ saying that security forces advancing from four different sides had linked up in the area, which is north of Qayyarah base, the main hub for the southern front.
In Bartalla, a Christian town just east of Mosul, army and counter-terrorism forces were consolidating their positions, unloading cases of weapons from trucks and organising their ammunition stocks. More than 17,600 people have fled their homes toward government-held areas since the Mosul operation began, the International Organisation for Migration said on Sunday.
Numbers are expected to soar as Iraqi forces close in on the city, which is home to more than a million people. The UN says there have been credible reports of ISIS carrying out mass executions in the city and seizing tens of thousands of people for use as human shields.
ISIS’s ‘depraved, cowardly strategy is to attempt to use the presence of civilians to render certain points, areas or military forces immune from military operations,’ UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement.
The jihadists are ‘effectively using tens of thousands of women, men and children as human shields,’ he said. The UN cited reports indicating ISIS has forcibly taken civilians into Mosul, killing those who resist or who were previously members of Iraqi security forces.
It said more than 250 people were executed in just two days earlier this week.
l At least 60 people have been killed in airstrikes by Saudi warplanes on a Red Sea port city in Yemen’s western province of Hudaydah. The airstrikes ripped through a security complex, housing two detention centers, in the northern district of Zaydiyah in the provincial capital Hudaydah late on Saturday.
A large number of prisoners and security guards were also among the victims, Yemen’s Saba news agency reported on Sunday, citing security and medical officials.
Nearly 40 people were also injured. According to Hashem al-Azizi, the governor of Hudaydah, more than 100 inmates were being held in the detention centers when they were struck three times.
Witnesses said one of the strikes directly hit the adjacent prisons and buried the inmates alive under the rubble. The airstrikes came hours after Saudi warplanes showered bombs on residential buildings in the western city of Ta’izz, killing at least 18 civilians, including children.
In another development on Saturday, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, Yemen’s president who has resigned and fled the capital, turned down a UN peace proposal aimed at ending the conflict in Yemen.
Hadi said the plan ‘rewards’ the Houthi Ansarullah movement, which is backed by the Yemeni nation. In support of Hadi, the Saudi military has been pounding Yemen since March 2015 in an attempt to undermine Ansarullah and restore power to the former president who has fled Sana’a.
More than 10,200 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Riyadh’s deadly campaign, which lacks any international mandate.
Peace talks held between Yemen’s opposing parties in Kuwait ended in deadlock in August.
• Syrian government forces and West-backed terrorists were locked in fierce fighting Sunday on Aleppo’s western edges, where 38 civilians have been killed in a two-day opposition offensive to break the government siege.
Allied jihadists launched a major offensive on Friday to break through government lines and reach the 250,000 people living in the city’s east. Since then, they have unleashed a salvo of rockets, artillery shells, and car bombs around the western government-controlled districts.
‘Rebel fighters have launched hundreds of rockets and shells onto the western districts from positions inside the city and on its western edges,’ said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the pro-Western so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Two days of such heavy rebel bombardment have killed 38 civilians, including 14 children, and wounded another 250.
Fighting has also killed 30 Syrian Army and allied fighters, as well as 50 Syrian rebels, according to the Observatory. The monitor did not have an immediate death toll for foreign anti-regime fighters, many of whom have joined jihadist factions.
About 1,500 terrorists have massed on a 15-kilometre front along the western edges of Aleppo since Friday, scoring quick gains in the Dahiyet al-Assad district but struggling to push east since then.
Fighting lasted all night and into Sunday, with air strikes and artillery fire along the western battlefronts heard even in the eastern districts, a correspondent there said.
Plumes of smoke could be seen snaking up from the city’s skyline.
A Syrian military source said that the rebel assault was ‘massive and coordinate’ but insisted it was unable to break into any neighbourhoods besides Dahiyet al-Assad. ‘They’re using Grad missiles and car bombs and are supported by foreign fighters in their ranks,’ he said.
Those waging the assault included reinforcements from Idlib province to the west, among them the jihadist Fateh al-Sham Front, which changed its name from Al-Nusra Front after breaking ties with Al-Qaeda. Last week, Russia implemented a three-day ‘humanitarian pause’ intended to allow civilians and surrendering rebels to leave Aleppo’s east, but few did so.
Moscow says it will continue a halt on air strikes over Aleppo, in place since October 18. The Russian military said Friday it had asked President Vladimir Putin for authorisation to resume the raids.
But Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin ‘considers it inappropriate at the current moment’, adding that the president thought it necessary to ‘continue the humanitarian pause’ in Aleppo.
