Iraqi special forces paused their advance into the
Islamic State group stronghold of Mosul on Wednesday, as poor
weather hampered visibility and troops attempted to clear a
recaptured neighborhood of any remaining militants, military
officials said.
Special forces could be seen going house to house in the Gogjali
neighborhood of the country's second-largest city, while sappers
searched the road for explosives and booby traps left behind by the
jihadi fighters as they were driven out of the eastern district a
day earlier.
Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, the top counterterrorism forces
commander, told reporters that the special forces had imposed a
curfew in the neighborhood while gains there were being
consolidated.
"We fear that Daesh militants could attack our forces or the
town with mortars," he said, using the Arabic acronym for IS. "So
for the safety of the families we ask them to stay inside their
houses," he said in Bartella, some 15 kilometers (9 miles) behind
the front lines.
Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil said that no advances were planned
while high humidity and clouds obscured the view of aircraft and
drones — a key component to the operations provided by a U.S.-led
air campaign.
The guns were largely silent in Gogjali, which is inside Mosul's
city limits but just outside more urban districts, although
sporadic rifle cracks could be heard as well as some army artillery
fire on IS positions. Fadhil said special forces had detained three
suspected IS militants in the area.
The pause came a day after Iraqi troops set foot in the city for
the first time in more than two years, gearing up for urban warfare
expected to take weeks, if not months.
In the next stage, troops will have to navigate streets likely
lined with booby traps, fighting house-to-house while trying to
avoid killing civilians, more than one million of whom are still in
the city.
Mosul is the last major IS stronghold in Iraq, and driving the
militant group from the city would be a major blow to its ambitions
of creating a cross-border "caliphate" stretching into Syria. IS
announced the project in Mosul in 2014, after it routed the much
larger Iraqi military, which had been neglected and demoralized by
corruption.
However, concern over the fate of civilians caught up in the
fighting has been growing, after residents reported that IS
militants were rounding up thousands of people to use as human
shields and killing those with suspected links to the security
forces.
According to one account given to The Associated Press, the
fighters went door to door in villages south of Mosul, ordering
hundreds of people at gunpoint to march north into the city, where
urban fighting is expected to be heaviest and the presence of
civilians will slow the army's advance as it tries to avoid killing
innocents.
In the latest international condemnation of IS, which has
carried out mass killings of perceived opponents in the past and
boasted about them in grisly photos and videos circulated online,
the United Nations called on authorities to collect evidence of IS
abuses of civilians for future use by tribunals.
Aid agency The Norwegian Refugee Council warned that the lives
of more than 1 million civilians trapped inside Mosul "are in grave
danger" as Iraqi troops advance into the city.
The group, which works with refugees and internally displaced
people, said that around 18,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since
the start of the massive military operation to retake Mosul over
two weeks ago.
The council's Iraq chief, Wolfgang Gressmann, said the agency's
aid workers were "bracing ... for the worst."
"The lives of 1.2 million civilians are in grave danger, and the
future of all of Iraq is now in the balance," he said
Adama Dieng, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban
Ki-moon on the prevention of genocide, also expressed concern over
"the increasing risk" of sectarian violence or revenge attacks
during the Mosul campaign, especially where state-sanctioned Iraqi
Shiite militias are approaching Sunni communities.
"Any kind of retaliatory violence against individuals on the
basis of their membership of a specific group is unacceptable and
will undermine the legitimate calls of these communities for their
own protection and for their long-standing grievances to be
addressed," he said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Political rhetoric on the issue is heating up, after Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently warned that Turkey would be
closely monitoring Shiite militias' behavior in northern Iraq and
seeking to safeguard the rights of ethnic Turkmens there. Erdogan
said the Iraqi Shiite militias could prompt a Turkish response if
they "terrorize" the Iraqi-Turkmen town of Tal-Afar.
On Tuesday, Turkey's defense minister said his country was
making preparations for "all kinds of possibilities" as the Turkish
military began deploying tanks and other vehicles to the border
town of Silopi.
In a televised speech later that evening to praise the Mosul
operation, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi downplayed an
escalation. "We don't want war with Turkey. We do not want
confrontation with Turkey," he said. But if one happens, "we are
ready."