Iraqi special forces pushed deeper into the northern city of Mosul on Wednesday, backed by airstrikes but under attack by rockets and suicide bombers from the Islamic State group.
Troops have established a foothold in the city’s east, and drove northward into the Tahrir neighborhood, where families left their houses to flee the fighting. Mortars from IS-held territory wounded at least five children trying to flee the fighting, who were evacuated by the troops.
Artillery and airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition supported the advance, sending plumes of smoke into the air over the city.
Iraqi troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, the country’s second largest city and the last major IS holdout in Iraq. The special forces have been the tip of the spear, driving the furthest into the city itself, but they are still fighting over neighborhoods in its eastern edges.
The offensive to drive IS out the northern city, the country’s second largest and the last major IS bastion in Iraq, began on Oct. 17. After swift initial gains into the suburbs, progress has slowed as troops move into more built-up areas of the city, still home to more than 1 million civilians.
Special forces have captured a foothold in the east, and have been advancing slowly over the past week to avoid casualties and civilian deaths as IS fighters emerge to attack from the dense, urban landscape, often with armor-plated suicide car bombs.
Meanwhile, Islamic State is using wooden replicas of tanks and Humvees in a bid to subvert an air campaign by the U.S.-led military coalition supporting Iraqi forces in the Mosul operations, even using bearded mannequins to simulate jihadist fighters.
The Iraqi army captured a handful of the mockups last week at a training site it retook from the group north of Mosul, Islamic State’s last major stronghold in the country, which government forces have almost surrounded but only breached so far from one direction.
When seen close up, the models resemble toys but from a long distance they might be mistaken for real vehicles.
“As our troops advanced toward the areas we were charged with liberating, Daesh used tanks and vehicles made of wood to divert the military planes,” Lieutenant Colonel Abbas al-Azaji said on Sunday, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State.
It is not clear how effective the mockups have been at thwarting aerial bombardment, which has been essential to the Iraqi forces’ ground campaign to roll back Islamic State from large swathes of territory it seized in 2014.
Baghdad-based spokesman U.S. Air Force Col. John Dorrian said the coalition had been tracking Islamic State’s use of such decoy vehicles for a while.
“We call it tactical deception. Daesh has been doing it and that’s certainly a tactic that enemies like to use,” he said.
“It is actually not as troubling as a lot of the other things we’ve seen,” he said, like setting fire to a sulfur plant and igniting oil wells south of Mosul.
Also found at the training site were two large armored vehicles the militants had used for assaulting enemy positions, and the blown out rem
The Iraqi army fires a 155mm shell towards Islamic State militant positions in Mosul, from the village of Ali Rash, east of Mosul, Iraq, on Tuesday. AP
