US To Provide More Support For Iraq To Retake Mosul From IS

The United States warned its citizens to be ready to leave Iraq in the event of what it has said could be a catastrophic collapse of the country’s largest hydro-electric dam near Mosul. “Yes, we fully expect to do that”, Carter told reporters at a briefing on Monday.

In a breach scenario, the embassy said 500,000 to 1.47 million Iraqis living in areas most exposed to the flood wave along the Tigris River would probably not survive if they were not evacuated.

The dam was built in 1984 but has fallen into severe disrepair over decades of dictatorship, war and instability in Iraq.

A report by a panel of Iraqi and Swedish geologists and engineers a year ago described it as “the most unsafe dam in the world”, saying its very construction was a “mystery” in view of the unfavourable geology.

The US embassy in Baghdad said long-running deterioration meant the danger was now at an “unprecedented” level.

Dunford added that the operations against Mosul “have already started”, with efforts to isolate the city with the use of cyber and ground moves to cut the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s (ISIL’s)lines of communications with Raqqa, its capital in Syria.

Italian firm Trevi has been selected to carry out crucial fix work on the Mosul Dam, which is now protected by Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Parts of the city could be under 45 feet of water within hours of a dam breach, the U.S. said, giving residents little time to flee. Water has continued to seep through since then, further weakening the dam.

The message issued by the U.S. embassy to American citizens said: “Some models estimate that Mosul could be inundated by as much as 70ft (21 metres) of water within hours of the breach”.