They haven’t pushed forward in days. The water bottles and Styrofoam food containers they’ve used up pile around them, spilling into the houses’ gardens.
Advancing into Mosul has become a painful slog for Iraqi forces. Daesh militants have fortified each neighborhood, unlike past battles where they concentrated their defenses in one part of the city. As a result, every advance inflicts relatively high casualties.
Weeks of urban combat have already left some of Iraq’s most capable soldiers battered, and only about a quarter of the city has come under their control.
It took up to 10 days for Iraqi troops to move a few hundred meters and retake the neighborhood of Al-Barid, a district of grand, upscale homes where fruit trees grow in the gardens.
There were only a few Daesh fighters in the neighborhood, but they were able to hold back the much larger Iraqi force because they were faster and more nimble than the slow-moving convoys of hundreds of troops, said Hatem al-Kurdi, one of the residents who remained in the district throughout the fight.
The militants “cut holes in the walls between the homes so they could always be moving from one position to another,” Kurdi said.
For every few hundred meters of their territory, Daesh militants allocate as few as four to five fighters, along with a handful of car bombs, to fight to the death, said Iraqi special forces Maj. Firas Mehdi. It is the same formula of counterattacks and defenses he has seen in every neighborhood he enters, he said.
If Iraq’s military continues at the current pace, they may retake Mosul in the coming months, but at significant costs. Current rates of attrition risk further weakening the military, a legacy that could haunt Iraq’s security forces for years, AP reported.
A medic who operates in eastern Mosul said he sees an average of 18 military casualties a day, and his figures would not cover the other main front southeast of Mosul. A hospital official in the nearby city of Irbil corroborated the figure. They spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to disclose military casualty figures to the press.