Facing defeat, ISIL mounts diversionary attack to Mosul’s south

MOSUL/TIKRIT – Reuters

Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants attacked a village south of Mosul, killing several people including two journalists, even as they were about to lose their last redoubt in the city to an Iraqi military onslaught, security sources said on July 7.

The assault on Imam Gharbi village appeared to be the sort of diversionary, guerrilla-style strike tactics Islamic State is expected to focus on as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces regain control over cities IS captured in a shock 2014 offensive.

Security sources said ISIL insurgents had infiltrated Imam Gharbi, some 70 kilometers south of Mosul on the western bank of the Tigris river late on July 5 from a pocket of territory still under their control on the eastern bank. 

Two Iraqi journalists were reported killed and two others wounded as they covered the security forces’ counter-attack to take back the village on July 7. An unknown number of civilians and military were also killed or wounded in the clashes.

The fighting forced the U.N.-affiliated International Organization for Migration to suspend relief operations at two sites where it houses nearly 80,000 people near Qayyara, just north of Imam Gharbi, a U.N. statement said.

With water trucks no longer able to reach the sites, the displaced people could run short of water at a time of midsummer temperatures well over 40 Celsius degrees, it said.

In Mosul, ISIL clung to a slowly shrinking pocket on the Tigris west bank, battling for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, which forced Iraqi troops to fight house-to-house in densely-populated blocks. 

The Iraqi military has forecast final victory this week in what used to be the de facto capital of IS’s “caliphate” in Iraq, after a grinding eight-month, U.S.-backed offensive to wrest back the city, whose pre-war population was 2 million.  

But security forces faced ferocious resistance from roughly several hundred militants hunkered down among thousands of civilians in the maze of alleyways in Mosul’s Old City.  

Air strikes and artillery salvoes continued to pound Islamic State’s last Mosul bastion on Friday, a Reuters TV crew said.

Mosul was by far the largest city seized by Islamic State in its offensive three years ago where the ultra-hardline group declared its “caliphate” over adjoining parts of Iraq and Syria.

Stripped of Mosul, ILIS’s dominion in Iraq will be reduced to mainly rural, desert areas west and south of the city where tens of thousands of people live, and the militants are expected to keep up asymmetric attacks on selected targets across Iraq.

Adhel Abu Ragheef, a Baghdad-based expert on jihadist groups, said Islamic State was likely to carry out “more of these raid-type attacks on security forces to try to divert them away from the main battle”, now in Mosul and then in other areas west of Mosul including near the Syrian border still ISIL control.