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Iraqi forces eye tougher fight in Mosul’s west

AP PHOTO Civilians walk amid the rubble after a battle between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants in the eastern side of Mosul, Iraq, Saturday. U.S.-backed Iraqi government troops announced on Wednesday they were in "full control" of eastern Mosul, after routing Islamic State militants from that part of the northern city almost exactly three months since the major operation started.

MOSUL, Iraq — A crowd of Iraqi officers looked out at the Tigris River Friday from a balcony of Mosul’s Nineveh International hotel. Just over three months ago, the men were some 45 kilometers (28 miles) away in a cluster of desert villages on the edge of Nineveh plain.

“Our message to the rest of Mosul’s residents is that victory is near,” said Lt. Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, on a celebratory tour after the city’s east was declared largely liberated on Wednesday.

The progress of Iraqi forces, halting at first, sped up this month as they closed in on the river that roughly divides Mosul into eastern and western halves. But that momentum is unlikely to be sustained and the city’s western half is poised to be a much tougher fight for the already fatigued forces.

When Sgt. Maj. Hussam Abdul-Latif pushed into Andalus on the morning of Jan. 16, he said the fight for the small neighborhood about a kilometer from the Tigris was nothing like his earlier battles in Mosul. This time, he said most IS fighters here fled hours before his troops arrived.

Safwan Thanoon, an Andalus resident, said dozens of fighters sped off on motorcycles overnight.

“This morning, not a single man was left, just those two corpses,” he added, pointing to a mangled body of an IS fighter in the street and another inside the garden of a nearby house.

“If they had stayed here it would have made the battle very difficult,” said Abdul-Latif, the special forces officer, explaining how when he first breached Mosul, a handful of snipers holed up within houses and using civilians as shields would slow his convoy, giving dozens of car bombs time to target the stalled forces. The defensive strategy inflicted high casualties and forced long pauses between pushes.

“When we enter the other bank, it will be like the operation beginning all over again,” Abdul-Latif said. He expects to face another wave of well-planned defenses and more heavily armed IS fighters.

Mosul’s west is more densely populated and home to the city’s oldest neighborhoods. The United Nations estimates some 750,000 people are still in the city’s west, many of them residents of outlying villages that IS fighters led on forced marches up the Tigris River valley as they lost ground there.

Narrow, winding streets are also expected to pose a particular problem as Iraqi troops won’t be able to largely fight from inside their vehicles like they did in the city’s east.

“We don’t have a strategy yet for these areas,” Maj. Gen. Sami al-Arithi said, referring to the older parts of Mosul. “For now our approach will be to just surround them and wait.”

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