Little was left inside the airport, and what was once a runway was littered with dirt and debris. The entire military complex adjacent to the airport is also now under government forces control. They have also reportedly seized an ISIS weapons storage warehouse, former ISIS headquarters and the barracks at al-Ghazlani.
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There are approximately 5,000 US troops inside Iraq, with several hundred embedded with Iraqi security forces advancing on multiple fronts on Mosul.
Several armored coalition vehicles could be seen in the line of military vehicles, and security officials said coalition troops were embedded with the forward advancing forces, advising the Iraqi troops as they conducted the assault.
Both the Ghazlani military base and the airport will serve as a base of operations as Iraqi forces launch subsequent pushes into western neighborhoods.
To avoid that, Iraqi forces this time made a decision to attack the militants from three directions in an attempt to confuse the defenders and deny them the ability to concentrate on any one front.
Damascus and Moscow have denied targeting civilians in Aleppo. There are now 450 conventional soldiers and a classified number of special operators embedded with elite Iraqi forces around Mosul, calling in airstrikes, training troops, and helping with battle tactics.
Over the border, IS is under attack on three fronts. In the past year, Iraq – backed by the US – has forced the extremists out of much of the country’s territory.
One Iraqi colonel leading the operation tells the BBC that western Mosul “is where the real fighting starts”.
According to independent news agency Rudaw, as the government forces continued their advance into the city, the Iraqi Counter-Terror Service (ICTS) circulated a six-point announcement across western Mosul.
In eastern Mosul, Isis fighters continue hurling mortars into civilian neighbourhoods from their hold outs across the river in western Mosul, causing dozens of daily injuries or deaths; as well as sending over drone mounted explosives to wreak carnage. It was signed “People from the east side”.
Iraqi forces have managed to push the jihadists out of most of their urban strongholds in the western province of Anbar, but the group is still active in the region, relying on hideouts in the desert.
Earlier this week, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis visited Iraq and vowed that the U.S. will support Iraq in its fight against Islamic State jihadists.
ISIS, which took large swathes of territory in both Iraq and Syria in 2013 and 2014, has maintained a presence in both nations and has faced an array of foes including national armies, worldwide powers and various militias working to defeat the jihadist organization.
Iraqi forces will be unable to move combat vehicles in the warren, and the coalition will find it hard to conduct airstrikes without hitting civilians.
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Military officials indicate that the battle for western Mosul would be involve intense house-to- house combat, owing to the narrower streets and the older tightly packed neighborhoods.
