Page 11 - aruba-today-20170308

WORLD NEWS A11
Wednesday 8 March 2017

Daring nighttime raid turns to deadly trap in Mosul

blocks past the front line the horizon behind him was sheed Yar Allah, who com-
in armored vehicles, but liberated and fully cleared. mands army operations in
breaching the complex it- He traced his troops’ ad- Nineveh province, praised
self on foot. vances on a tablet show- the Federal Police as he-
After facing very little resis- ing a satellite map of Mosul roes and Brett McGurk, the
tance, regular Federal Po- — boasting of their quick special envoy for the U.S.-
lice units followed and by progress — but the mark- led anti-IS coalition hailed
6:30 a.m. ers showed that the sol- the advance in a state-
From the roof of an aban- diers has just pushed up ment posted to Twitter.
doned school acting as a the two main roads lead- But by 11:00 a.m. clashes
forward base on the edge ing to the complex and inside the compound had
of Mosul’s Tayran neighbor- hadn’t cleared the dozens intensified and command-
hood, Maj. Gen. Ali Alami of tightly packed homes on ers behind the front were
said the Nineveh governor- either side. getting frantic radio calls
ate complex burning on Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Ra- for help. q

Iraqi security forces advance
during fighting against Islam-
ic State militants in Dawasa
neighborhood in western Mo-
sul, Iraq, Tuesday, March 7,
2017.

(AP Photo/K. Mohammed)

SUSANNAH GEORGE
ANDREA ROSA
Associated Press
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — Hours
after Mosul’s municipal
complex was declared
liberated by the country’s
top military commanders
and U.S.-led coalition offi-
cials, the wounded began
pouring into a small front-
line clinic just a few hun-
dred meters away.
“Daesh had everything
planned,” said Hamza
Dauoud of the Federal Po-
lice who helped rush his
injured comrades out of
a battered Humvee and
onto stretchers in the gar-
den of an abandoned
building.
“As we first advanced
there was no resistance
(from the Islamic State
group), but once we en-
tered, they woke up,”
Daoud said, explaining he
was only able to get out by
ramming through a make-
shift roadblock.
“We were stuck there,
nothing could reach us. I
barely escaped. The snip-
ers hit my car twice but I
never touched the brakes
once,” he said.
Iraqi forces launched a
daring nighttime raid in
the early hours of Tuesday
morning on the sprawl-
ing complex of municipal
buildings in western Mo-
sul along the Tigris River.
Beginning just after mid-
night, Iraq’s emergency
response division, an elite
arm of the Federal Police,
led the attack. Initially ad-
vancing some half a dozen