Iraqi general urges IS fighters to surrender

The militants have put up fierce resistance in villages surrounding the city, where most of the fighting has been concentrated.

700,000 people are believed to remain in the city, where up to 5,000 IS fighters are facing a third day of the operation to retake it.

The operation there has been complicated as ISIS appears to have brought civilians into the town, which was abandoned after the militants took control of it in 2014.

The strike, he added, had occurred Wednesday morning in Mosul’s Dawasa area on the bank of the Tigris River, which runs through the city.

Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah – one important city after another fell to Iraqi offences heavily backed up by air and artillery support in what became the slow and grisly proving grounds for the Mosul showdown.

“They are being held there against their will”, said Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis.

The massive operation launched on Monday is expected to take weeks or months.

Below ground, bags of fresh vegetables lay on the floor of a cooking area and a bowl of eggs sat beside a crude stove, suggesting the fighters managed to maintain supply lines up until days before their defeat.

Al-Maliki said his division was around three to four miles (five to six kilometers) from the city’s outskirts.

Coalition warplanes attacked 17 Islamic State positions in support of the Peshmerga operation in the heavily mined area, the Kurdish statement said, adding that at least four auto bombs were destroyed.

Some families recovering their freedom from ISIS for the first time in more than two years cautiously approached security forces waving white flags. Many Daesh militants pulled back to the Abassiya village.

While the long-awaited Mosul offensive began earlier this week, there’s no sign of an imminent campaign against Raqqa. A relatively small number of jihadists are putting up a fight against the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga forces in the villages leading up to the city, but there are reports that fighters are fleeing Mosul itself in growing numbers.

The coalition’s 94,000 members vastly outnumber their opponents.

The coalition vastly outnumbers its opponents, but ISIS, which has known the push was coming, has constructed elaborate defenses, including the network of tunnels.

Due to the limited role of the USA ground forces in Syria, Washington has to rely on cooperation between Turkey, the Kurdish fighters and Arab Sunni forces to retake Raqqa, according to media reports.

It appeared USA troops were at the back of the first column of Peshmerga to cross into ISIS-held territory at dawn Monday.

“Fifteen Daesh militants were killed after they were attacked by local residents in Mosul’s southern Haman al-Alil district”, Mosul-based Kurdish politician Said Memozini told Anadolu Agency. He hopes to bolster his legacy by seizing back as much territory as he can from Islamic State before he leaves office in January.

Abu Abdullah, a villager, asked one of the police fighters for a cigarette, also prohibited by the extremist jihadist organization. “Turkey did not help us for two and half years and now they want to come in Mosul?“. So you have mobile phones?

But the chief of Russia’s general staff, Valery Gerasimov, argued it was “necessary not to drive terrorists from one country to the other but to destroy them on the spot”.

Some spy planes have listening capability so they can locate and record mobile or radio messages and pinpoint ISIS command posts which are then targeted by bombers.

“There were more than 20 suicide cars that tried to target our vehicles during our advancement but they were taken care of by the heroes who man the Abram tanks”.