“The offensive to liberate Nineveh province started at dawn and raised the Iraqi flag on some villages by the hands of our heroic forces”, a military statement said.
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It was not immediately clear how long such a complex and taxing operation could take.
Iraqi officials say they will retake Mosul this year but, in private, many question whether the army, which partially collapsed when Islamic State overran a third of the country in June 2014, will be ready in time.
“The Peshmerga forces launched a new attack on ISIS strongholds north of Mosul, using heavy artillery and mortar fire, in a bid to cleanse the area from the militants and open a road towards the city”, Peshmerga member Reshid Soufy told ARA News.
The Makhmur District is also a key to holding oil fields around Kirkuk, and the ISIS offensive is seen by many analysts as part of an effort to ultimately regain control over those lucrative oil fields, and have been “outgunning” the thousands of Iraqi troops in the area. “The coalition is supporting the operation with air power”, Rassool told USA Today. A political crisis in Baghdad has prompted al-Abadi to pull some of Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces back from the front in the Euphrates River valley to secure the capital.
“Honestly we were supposed to already be in Hit by now”, said the commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to brief the press.
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But despite Baghdad’s announcement, the number of Iraqi troops needed to carry out the operation to retake Mosulmay not be sufficient. While IS still controls a large swath of Iraq and neighboring Syria, the group has lost an estimated 40 percent of the territory it once held in Iraq, according to U.S.-led coalition officials.
