IS attack breaches militiamen’s defenses in northern Iraq

Iraqi security forces, aided by the Kurdish Peshmerga, Shiite militias and a US -led worldwide coalition, began a ground offensive on october 17 to capture Mosul away from the control of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, ISIS and Daesh.

Iraqi soldiers walk next of their humvees with Iraqi and Shiite religious flags, near the ancient site of Nimrud, a town some southeast of Mosul, Iraq. Police and army officials said the attackers were killed before they reached the base.

The Obama administration is trying to preserve the fragile alliance between the Kurdish fighters and Iraq’s military that has made significant battlefield gains against Islamic State in Mosul but is now threatened by a budget battle in Parliament and uncertainty over the policies of the incoming Trump administration.

In Baghdad, a vehicle bomb blew up in a crowded market in the center of the city on Saturday, killing seven people and wounding 15, police and medical sources said.

A “multi-pronged” attack on the village followed, forcing the militiamen to flee, it added. The agency said 926 civilians died, including 733 in Baghdad.

Kubis said the growing death toll was largely a result of the jihadists’ ferocious defence of Mosul, the city where they proclaimed their now crumbling “caliphate” in 2014.

A newly identified spokesman for Islamic State has urged sympathisers around the world to carry out a fresh wave of attacks, singling out Turkish diplomatic, military and financial interests as the Islamists’ preferred targets.

Aware of the crisis on the Mosul front, the Pentagon has drawn up plans for sending out U.S. reinforcements in the hope of turning the tide of the stalled battle.

But as the battle has ground on, with Iraqi forces making slow progress in street by street battles, supplies of food and water have dwindled.

At the front line just south of the airport, the Iraqi army Sgt. Maj.

“Daesh (ISIS) has developed a significant chemical weapons capability in Syria and Iraq”, the report quoted in The Sunday Times said.

Rudaw’s Nabard Hussein reported heavy clashes between Iraqi forces and ISIS militants in northeastern Mosul on Sunday evening, as the military pushed into new neighborhoods and soldiers dodged snipers stationed on rooftops. “They threatened us to try to force us to leave with them, but we refused”, he said referring to militants.

“The casualty figures are staggering, with civilians accounting for a significant number of the victims”, the top United Nations envoy in Iraq, Jan Kubis, said.

Jawdat added that Iraqi security forces recovered a number of state-of-the-art cameras, dozens of video files, a considerable amount of money and numerous confidential documents from the site. Moreover, 926 civilians were killed and another 930 were wounded, it said.