350000 kids trapped in west Mosul

“The coalition forces are in support of this operation and we will continue. with the accelerated effort to destroy ISIS”, he said, using an acronym for the militant group.

According to United Nations estimates, there are some 800,000 civilians living in western Mosul.

Senior officers said the battle was likely to take at least as long as the grinding fight for the east of the city, which began in mid-October and ended in January when battered forces reached the Euphrates river, which bisects east and west.

Islamic State has escalated its insurgency in retaliation for the military setbacks that have, over the past year, forced it out of most Iraqi cities it had captured in 2014 and 2015.

Food prices in western Mosul are nearly twice as high as those in eastern Mosul, Sally Haydock, the representative of the World Food Program in Iraq, said in a statement.

Iraq’s militarized federal police, US -trained rapid response units and the Iraqi army will also participate. Since then, USA forces have steadily built up in Iraq and moved closer to front-line fighting.

“The situation is distressing”. “People, right now, are in trouble”.

“We’re going to make certain that we’ve got good situational awareness of what we face as we work together and fight alongside each other”, Mr Mattis said.

With cooking gas and kerosene scarce, families are burning wood, plastic, furniture, and garbage to heat their homes and cook their food.

Mosul fell to ISIS control during the militant group’s sweeping advance across Iraq in the summer of 2014. The news service reports the immediate objective is to capture the villages near Mosul’s airport, which rests on the southwest side of the city. They will also be strongly supported by U.S. artillery and airstrikes seeking to eliminate Isis strongpoints. By noon, the forces entered the village and gained control over much of the strategic hill as fighting was still raging, according to an Associated Press reporter embedded with the forces. There is some concern this could happen again. They have massed in preparation for the next fight, but have not been committed yet.

The Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, key U.S. allies, make up the second-largest fighting force with about 40,000 members.

The leaflets say Iraqi forces are already making advancements and are “providing guidance and recommendations” for citizens ahead of the offensive.

Most of the members of the PMU are Shi’ite fighters, some with ties to Iran. Two policemen said one Sunni fighter was killed and nine were wounded in the first attack, while the second attack wounded five soldiers.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Isis leader and self-appointed caliph, is in west Mosul according to Hoshyar Zebari, the former Iraqi finance and foreign minister, speaking to The Independent in an interview last week.