As the fight moves into the city, the battlefield will become simpler in one respect: Under the battle plan, only the Iraqi army and the special operations forces are to enter the city proper.
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“We’ve taken out hundreds of fighters, fighting positions (and) weapons” in the strikes, Dorrian said.
They are also waiting for reinforcements before attempting to push into the city centre, our correspondent says.
The leader of the Badr Organisation, the largest of the Popular Mobilisation militias, said his forces would cut off the main western supply route on Thursday, leaving Islamic State surrounded.
Some residents hung white flags on buildings and windows in a sign they would not resist government troops, said Maj. There are serious equities that must be balanced or checked, even as Mosul’s citizens are liberated.
He said all allegations of retaliatory violence by the security forces or by armed militias associated with them should be addressed effectively and without delay.
The Islamic State group is fighting to hold Mosul as Iraqi forces and allied Kurdish forces advance on the city from multiple directions with US -led coalition support.
The forces have made uneven progress in closing in on the city.
On the southern front, where Iraq’s elite Rapid Response Division is advancing towards the IS-held town of Hamam al-Alil some 20 kilometres from Mosul, a captured IS radio provided rare insight into how the jihadists operate.
IS has fallen back when massively outnumbered in recent battles, giving up some of its emblematic bastions – such as Fallujah in Iraq and Dabiq in Syria – without following its own apocalyptic ideology of fighting to the bitter end.
Judaidat al-Mufti is on the southeastern side of the city.
Iraqi special forces are holding their positions in Mosul a day after entering the Islamic State-held city for the first time since 2014.
The U.S. military estimates IS has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in Mosul and another 1,500 to 2,500 in its outer defensive belt.
The stream of humanity, which included shepherds pushing herds of sheep out of the war zone, crawled along in heavy traffic leaving Mosul and headed toward a swelling camp for displaced persons erected on the banks of the Khazir River, which has space for 1,000 families but is rapidly filling up. They stand against an anti-IS force of some 40,000, including army units, militarized police, special forces and Kurdish fighters.
“Now is the beginning of the true liberation of the city of Mosul”, Staff General Taleb Sheghati al-Kenani, the commander of the CTS, told Iraqiya from Gogjali.
“We are listening to and are able to access their communications”.
Tens of families were filmed out in the Iraqi desert making do with these makeshift sleeping arrangements due to a lack of any other shelter.
“Instead of the days we had set aside for these battles, they ended in just a few hours”, he said, referring to towns and villages retaken in the past two weeks. In a series of apparent retaliatory attacks, bombs exploded in five of Baghdad’s mostly Shiite neighborhoods, killing at least 17 people. The deadliest was in the northwestern Shalla neighborhood when a vehicle bomb ripped through a popular market area, killing at least eight civilians and wounding 23, police said.
Officials have warned that entering the city proper will likely trigger the fiercest fighting seen yet in the offensive, and with it a major challenge – differentiating fighters from civilians.
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“We are hearing reports about an upcoming storming of residential areas populated by civilians that are murky, but extremely alarming, given the mass casualties that could result”, the ministry’s spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov said.
