US and Iraqi officials have said the push on Mosul could begin in October, though there are concerns that not enough planning has been done for how to manage the city, Iraq’s second-largest, if and when Islamic State is expelled.
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Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford was asked at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Thursday about the disclosure a day earlier that the Islamic State may have attacked the base with chemical weapons.
Dunford made no mention of the US presence on the Qayara West base, but an official on Wednesday said “hundreds” of USA troops are there helping the Iraq security forces prepare for a coming offensive in Mosul.
No one was injured in attack in an unpopulated area near the Qayyara West base, where hundreds of American forces are working to prepare an airfield ahead of Iraq’s offensive to retake the city of Mosul from ISIL. ISIS militants deployed a weapon containing a mustard agent against the base on Tuesday, though no US troops were injured. He says a small group of USA soldiers who inspected remnants of the rocket found a black, oily substance on a fragment of metal. It is regularly targeted by indirect fire, a senior defense official at the Pentagon said.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced earlier this week at the United Nations General Assembly meetings that Iraqi forces began an operation on Tuesday in Shirqat, a town north of Baghdad, to further damage ISIS supply lines to Mosul in preparation for a larger battle.
The U.S. envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition said on Wednesday the coalition was already taking steps to ensure there would be no repeat in the Mosul offensive of the abuses seen in the wake of the recapture of Falluja in June, when Shi’ite militias detained, abused and tortured scores of Sunni civilians.
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Remaining Islamic State fighters in Shirqat are resisting in groups of three and four from inside houses, according to the Iraqi operations command source, who said three army personnel had been killed in recent hours.
