About 31 civilians killed by extremist militia in Iraq

ISIS forces in Mosul have nearly been surrounded by the one hundred thousand man coalition sieging their last Iraqi stronghold. Anxious that they might be targeted because of reports of ISIS rounding up security force members, these officers and at least 65 others escaped.

Heavy fighting broke out in Mosul’s eastern Tahrir neighborhood on Wednesday, where Iraqi special forces said a suicide auto bomber from the Islamic State group disabled an Abrams tank belonging to the Iraqi army.

Elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) forces posted at intersections along the road pounded targets a few hundred metres away with heavy machine gun fire.

Zahra resident Alaa Youssef, 47, said civilians in Mosul had an obligation to inform the military about Islamic State fighters who had hidden inside houses or shaved their beards and changed their clothing to blend in with civilians. Iraqi troops entered Nimrud on Sunday in what was the most significant gain in several days for government forces.

The city is also said to be rigged with improvised explosive devices, as well as suicide bombers and sniper fire, all of which have slowed progress in the dense urban battlefield. Mosul is still home to more than 1 million civilians. Now the Shi’ite militia is thought to be besieging about 70 villages west of Mosul, which the sheikh says are being subjected to random shelling, including of residential areas. Up to a dozen children are being maimed every day as fighting pushes into the city, according to Save the Children.

Popular Mobilisation, known locally by its Arabic name Hashid Shaabi, has said it plans to use Tal Afar Base to take the battle against Daesh into Syria, fighting on the side of President Bashar Assad, an ally of Iran. They also rigged up barrels full of explosives which they appeared to detonate at the site.

The second mass grave was discovered contained about 45 bodies.

“We have information that all of the archaeological sites inside Mosul have already been destroyed”, he said.

He added, “You see all those shells”.

Video released by ISIS supporters in 2014, purporting to show them at work in Nimrud, included footage of the militants using bulldozers and electric drills to tear down murals and statues. “Thank God we captured them”.

Prime minister Haider al-Abadi’s office said there was agreement between the government and the Kurds that provides for their “withdrawal to the places they held before the start of the liberation operations”.

Iraq’s premier and its Kurdish regional chief were publicly at odds yesterday over territorial control after the recapture of Mosul, even with the battle for the city far from over.

The military aircraft also pounded a Daesh fuel station in the nearby town of Anah.

Spokesman Col John Dorrian said that the coalition, which coordinates all its attacks with the Iraqis, has been observing the battlefield and has noted that Daesh forces can no longer move in large numbers.

Finally, Iraqi army forces have intercepted and targeted an unmanned aerial vehicle of the Daesh group in the skies over the holy shrine city of Karbala.

“The flow of new recruits has dropped to its lowest level since the conflict began”, and IS’s “resource base is shrinking as it loses territory and as coalition air strikes degrade the resources that fund its operations”, the statement said.