Watch Mosul War Video: ISIS Fights Iraqi Troops In Streets As Operation To Recapture City Reaches Violent New Stage
Dramatic new video from inside Mosul, Iraq, reveals a violent new stage of the operation to retake the city from ISIS as the attack on Mosul enters its fourth week. Peshmerga troops — the military unit of the Kurdistan government based in northern Iraq — have reportedly fought their way into Iraq’s second-largest city, as Iraqi special forces units faced tenacious resistance from ISIS fighters in Mosul’s eastern outskirts, according to media reports from the war’s front line.
In the following video, released by the Russian video news agency Ruptly, Iraqi police and security troops with aerial cover from the Iraqi Air Force storm a town known as Hammam al-Alil on the Mosul outskirts Saturday.
But the following video shows the fight from an entirely different perspective — the ISIS perspective. Through the terrorist group’s own underground media channels, ISIS released the following video of militants in the streets of Mosul firing at the troops from the joint Iraqi-Kurdish force that has moved in to drive the ISIS fighters out after ISIS has held on to Mosul since June of 2014.
Another video showed the perspective of news media attempting to cover the deadly chaos now gripping Mosul, as CNN correspondent Arwa Damon found herself in the middle of a gunfight between the Iraqi troops and ISIS militants — and coming away believing that the Iraqi troops were “seemingly ill equipped and poorly trained for the task at hand,” the CNN report said.
ISIS fighters refused to give up on Saturday, launching counter-offensives against the attacking Iraqi and Kurdish troops, using civilians as human shields, and deploying multiple suicide bomber attacks against the advancing troops.
The troops also found themselves running into barriers and berms constructed in the Mosul streets by ISIS more than two years ago when the terrorist group first seized the city is a sweeping rampage across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014.
Iraqi troops continued, however, to make progress on the 21st day of the offensive that commenced on October 17, according to reports by the Kurdish news agency Rudaw.
“From the southern front, the federal police and Nineveh operation forces liberated Najira and Bakhira villages north of Hamam Al-Alil, and continue to clear Hamam Al-Alil of IEDs and mines on the roads to secure the areas and ensure people can return,” Iraq’s War Media Office announced in a statement on Sunday, reported by Rudaw.
“From the southeast front, the 9th armored division and the third brigade of 1st division forces have entered the left bank and proceeded to go inside Intisar and Judaydat al-Mufti neighborhoods, and are continuing to clear the area of the terrorists ISIS. They cut the Kirkuk-Mosul road from the Judaydat al-Mufti direction.”
“On the northern front, the 16th infantry division forces liberated an area in A’weza, and entered the al-Sada area, and opened a road from Shalalat toward al-Sada in A’weza.”
“On the western front, the Hashd al-Shaabi continue to search and clear the liberated areas, and clear the road that links the crossroads of al-Hazzir and Ayn al-Jahsh.”
The Iraqi military also claimed that it killed a top ISIS commander, Algerian-born Abu Hamza al-Ansari, in a clash between militants and the army’s 15th division in the southern district of Mosul on Sunday. At the same time, Iraq said that its government had regained full control of the last significant town leading to Mosul from the south, Hammam al-Alil.
[Featured Image By Carl Court/Getty Images]
