Italy to send troops near Iraq combat zone to protect dam workers

When the dam was overrun by Isil in August previous year, there were fears that the extremist group would try to blow it up, unleashing a tidal wave of water which could have hit Baghdad, 240 miles to the south, and other cities downstream on the Tigris River.

ROME Dec 16 Italy will send 450 troops near the front line with Islamic State militants in Iraq to protect workers conducting repairs to the Mosul hydro-electric dam, the country’s biggest, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said on Wednesday.

“Everybody was saying “let’s bomb here”, “let’s bomb there”, “bomb, bomb”.

Mosul Dam, opened by Saddam Hussein in 1983, is 131 m high and 3.2 km long, has a capacity of 8 million m³ and can supplying electricity to nearly 2 million people living in the area.

This will be followed up with a “permanent solution to consolidate the dam”, Trevi said in a statement. The job should take about 18 months.

At least 15 Kurdish soldiers of the Peshmerga army were killed in an offensive by militant fighters of the Islamic State (ISIS) in northern Iraq, military sources confirmed on Wednesday.

While Italy already has about 750 soldiers in Iraq, most are involved in training Iraqi soldiers and police in the Kurdish regional capital Erbil and Baghdad, the Iraqi capital.

Kurdish forces and US air support killing over 180 ISIS fighters in a battle that lasted almost 40 hours, military officials tell FOX News.

Paolo Gentiloni, the foreign minister, said the mission was “an important strategic intervention” in an area “very close to that controlled by Daesh” (an alternative name for Isil).

After the Islamists were ousted, Italian construction group Trevi secured a $2bn (£1.3bn) contract to fix the facility, but security conditions have since been too frail for works to start. The company did not confirm the potential value of the contract.