Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has celebrated with Iraqi troops in Mosul as they drove Islamic State militants from some of their last strongholds following a nearly nine-month campaign.
However, heavy fighting by holdouts was yesterday continuing in parts of the Old City neighbourhood.
Dressed
in a black military uniform, a smiling al-Abadi walked amid the
soldiers, at one point grabbing an Iraqi flag and briefly draping it on
his shoulders.
Other troops waved flags and pointed their weapons in the air nearby.
Al-Iraqia
TV quoted him as saying he "congratulates the heroic fighters and the
people on the big victory” in Iraq’s second-largest city, even as
fighting rang out in pockets near the militants’ last stand at the
Tigris River.
The loss of Mosul would mark a major defeat for the Islamic State, which has suffered a series of setbacks over the past year.
The
militants control less than a square kilometre (less than a mile) of
territory in the shattered city in northern Iraq. However, they were
using human shields, suicide bombers and snipers in a fight to the
death.
Islamic State militants seized Mosul in the summer of 2014 when they swept across northern and central Iraq.
That
summer, the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, appeared at Mosul’s
al-Nuri Mosque and declared a caliphate on territory it seized in Iraq
and Syria.
Iraq launched the operation to retake Mosul in October, backed by airstrikes from the US-led coalition.
The fierce battle has killed thousands and displaced more than 897,000 people.
Last
month, as Iraqi troops closed in on Mosul’s Old City, the militants
destroyed the
al-Nuri Mosque and its
famous leaning minaret to deny
the forces a symbolic
triumph.
Lieutenant General Jassim Nizal
of the army’s 9th Division said his forces achieved "victory” in their
sector after a similar announcement by the militarised Federal Police.
His soldiers danced to patriotic music atop tanks even as airstrikes sent up plumes of smoke nearby.
Nizal
acknowledged that many of his men were among those who fled the city
when IS forces seized Mosul in 2014 in a humiliating defeat for the
Iraqi armed forces.
"Some things happened here, that’s true,” he said. "But we have come back.”
Much of the Old City and surrounding areas have been devastated by the gruelling urban combat.
Yesterday,
a line of weary civilians walked out of the Old City and past the
shells of destroyed apartment blocks lining the cratered roads.
Heba Walid held her sister-in-law’s baby, which was born into war.
The parents of the six-month-old, along with 15 other family members, were killed last month when an airstrike hit their home.
When Walid ran out of formula, she fed the baby a paste of crushed biscuits mixed with water.
US-backed
Syrian forces have encircled and pushed into Islamic State’s de facto
capital of Raqqa in neighbouring Syria after a month of fighting,
although a long battle lies ahead.
More than 2,000 militants are
holed up with their families and tens of thousands of civilians in
Raqqa’s centre, where the city’s most densely populated districts can be
found.
The extremists still hold several smaller towns and villages across Iraq and Syria.
