The militants were fighting back, firing mortars at the advancing troops and detonating at least one auto bomb. Clouds of smoke could be seen rising in the area as fighting continued.
Advertisement
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.
Kurdish peshmerga advance southeast of Mosul on August 14. The bridge crosses the Grand Zab river that flows into the Tigris.
Mosul is the largest urban center under the militants’ control, with a pre-war population of almost 2 million.
But Iraq Prime Minster Haider al-Abadi said the loss of Mosul would effectively mark IS’s defeat in Iraq.
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.
IS has been controlling Mosul, 400 km north of Baghdad, for around two years now.
Aided by US-led coalition air strikes, the latest advance is part of a wider operation to encircle and retake Iraq’s second largest city.
A journalist working for local satellite channel Kurdistan TV was also killed when a mortar round struck the peshmerga convoy he was travelling in on Sunday. The Kurdish forces known as the Peshmerga say they have retaken 12 vill.
Iraq’s Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, a press freedom NGO, confirmed the cameraman’s death.
Peshmerga Brig. Gen. Dedewan Khurshid Tofiq described the operation outside Mosul as “ongoing”.
The Kurdish security council said the area cleared was about 50 square kilometres. The pilots said that since 2014 they have been evacuating peshmerga wounded in the fighting because the Kurdish forces are short of military helicopters.
Advertisement
The terrorist group, however, still controls several parts in the country.
