Arwa Damon, Brice Laine: CNN Correspondent Recalls Fierce Mosul Gun Battle, ISIS Suicide Attack

CNN’s Poppy Harlow reported today that Iraqi forces are currently fighting “house-to-house” in the battle to retake Mosul from ISIS. The anchor read some of the notes that senior correspondent Arwa Damon made shortly after the convoy she was traveling with was attacked by an ISIS suicide bomber, where the reporter remembered a family with children running to escape the violence.

Arwa Damon was then brought on live with Poppy Harlow, speaking from Irbil, located about 55 miles from where the battle to retake Mosul is raging.

The correspondent recalled traveling with photographer Brice Laine, together with a group of Iraqi “counter-terrorism forces.” Damon described a “complex attack” made by ISIS while the convoy was traveling down narrow streets approaching Mosul. She said the attack wound up splitting the convoy into two sections.

“I have to say that this is the most harrowing experience that I personally have ever been through, despite having covered war zones for over a decade,” Arwa Damon stated.

Using gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades to split the convoy in two, Arwa Damon described how ISIS then began going through each vehicle “systematically” forcing the occupants out, who were then said to have been forced into the surrounding buildings.

Damon stated that the Iraqi troops she was traveling with were in vulnerable positions once they were forced into the buildings, weathering continuing ISIS attacks.

“At the end of a very long 24 hours, the bottom line is that we were under siege with about 22 wounded soldiers, six who were not wounded,” Damon remembered the experience.

The CNN correspondent said that the troops were calling for backup, but for some reason it was not coming. Arwa Damon said that ISIS fighters were located in the building next to the building she had spent the night in, after fleeing the convoy attack, together with an Iraqi family who was fleeing the violence. She described the Islamic State fighters taking up positions on the rooftop and throwing grenades into the courtyard of the building where her party was located, wounding members of the Iraqi forces.

Finally, Damon reported that an airstrike came and leveled the house sheltering “eight ISIS fighters.” Reports indicated that forces deployed to back-up her convoy, themselves got caught in entanglements with ISIS.

Arwa Damon held up her experience, where reinforcements could not reach her for close to 24 hours, as an example of the “challenges” faced by Iraqi and Kurdish forces in their fight to rid Mosul of the Islamic State.

Sim Track, a military analyst with Stratfor, presented satellite imagery showing some of the defenses that the Islamic State has put into place in Mosul to slow the advance of Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Track presented images that appeared to show sections of a Mosul roadway with concrete blocks ready to be toppled if front lines get too close. Other images show earthen berms designed to not only slow the progress of the coalition forces, but to be used for protection by ISIS fighters.

Track noted that ISIS is still “holding its ground” in Mosul and that ISIS fighters have not been “sitting waiting idly by” for Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces to sweep over them. He described the positions taken up by Islamic State forces as being “impressive” from a military perspective.

CNN stated that if the battle that Arwa Damon and Brice Laine were caught up in is representative of what the Kurdish Peshmerga and Iraqi forces are going to encounter in the coming weeks, the battle to retake Mosul “will only get more difficult.”

There are said to be 30,000 Iraqi forces, which includes “elite units” like the Golden Division and Counter Terrorism Force. ISIS is thought to have as many as 7,000 troops stationed in positions both inside and surrounding Iraq’s second largest city, previously having a population of 1.2 million.

The possibility of as many as 1 million refugees as a result of the battle has been raised by agencies followed by CNN. Close to 30,000 people are known to have been displaced by the fight so far, according to the International Organization for Migration.

[Featured Image by Carl Court/Getty Images]