Earlier in the day, a Kurdish security source told Xinhua that the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, backed by heavy artillery shelling and the USA -led air strikes, launched an offensive at dawn against the IS positions on villages scattered in the northeast of Mosul.
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The advance started post strong air strikes and shelling as led by a United States coalition against ISIS.
The militants were fighting back, firing mortars at the advancing troops and detonating at least one auto bomb. Rudaw, a local television network, showed footage of smoke rising from a village in the distance as armored vehicles pushed across a field.
Kurdish Peshmerga forces on Monday said they had secured a river crossing point enabling them to open a new front against Islamic State and further tighten their grip on the militants’ capital Mosul. If the Peshmerga can fix the bridge, they will be able to surround Mosul.
The northern Iraqi city was from where IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate – a state governed in accordance with Islamic law.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has vowed to retake Mosul and rid the country of IS by the end of 2016.
In another development on Saturday, Iraqi media quoted Amir Wasiq, a senior police official in Nineveh Province, as saying that Daesh militants executed 60 ex-officers for cooperating with Iraqi intelligence services in an area south of Mosul. In July it captured the Qayyara airfield, 35 miles south of Mosul, which will serve as the main staging post for the expected offensive.
Kurdish forces in Iraq received a shipment of around a million bullets for machine guns and a substantial number of Kalashnikov rifles to storm a stronghold of militant group Islamic State (ISIS), Kurdish representatives in Moscow announced on Monday. A photo journalist was killed while a reporter of the Kurdistan satellite channel – affiliated to the Kurdistan Democratic Party – was injured.
Iraq’s Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, a press freedom NGO, confirmed the cameraman’s death.
Peshmerga Brig. Gen. Dedewan Khurshid Tofiq says Sunday that “Four villages have been liberated so far”.
“A military operation was launched this morning”.
The Kurdish security council said the area cleared was about 50 square kilometres.
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The Iraqi army and the Peshmerga forces are now fighting to seize back positions around Mosul amid a major offensive to liberate the whole city.
