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                                                             October 18, 2016                  the East’
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Retaking Mosul

A Peshmerga convoy drives towards a frontline in Khazer, about 19 miles east of Mosul, Iraq, Monday, Oct. 17, 2016. The Iraqi military and the country’s Kurdish
forces say they launched operations to the south and east of militant-held Mosul early Monday morning.

                                                                                                                                                                                                        (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Iraqis Launch Long-Awaited Offensive in IS-Held Mosul

S. GEORGE                      plosives as plumes of black   kilometers (five miles).          gee camps.                     ground forces over the
Associated Press               and orange smoke rose         But the forces’ hold ap-          Iraq’s second-largest city,    past year, IS now controls
KHAZER, Iraq (AP) — The        overhead — the opening        peared fragile and the            Mosul fell to IS in the sum-   less than half the territory it
long-awaited offensive to      phase of an unprecedent-      gains largely symbolic.           mer of 2014 as the mili-       once held, and Iraqi Prime
retake Mosul from the Is-      ed campaign expected to       Some of the villages were         tants swept over much of       Minister Haider Al-Abadi
lamic State group began        take weeks if not months,     so small they comprised           the country’s north and        has pledged the fight for
Monday with a volley of        and involve more than         no more than a few doz-           central areas. Weeks later     Mosul will lead to the libera-
U.S.-led coalition airstrikes  25,000 troops.                en homes, and most were           the head of the extrem-        tion of all Iraqi territory from
and heavy artillery bom-       By the end of the day Kurd-   abandoned.                        ist group, Abu Bakr al-        the militants this year.
bardments on a cluster of      ish forces had retaken        And though some troops            Baghdadi, announced the        Al-Abadi announced the
villages along the edge of     some 200 square kilome-       were less than 30 kilometers      formation of a self-styled     start of the operation on
Iraq’s historic Nineveh plain  ters (80 square miles), ac-   (20 miles) from Mosul’s edg-      caliphate in Iraq and Syria    state television before
east of the militant-held      cording to the president      es, it was unclear how long       from the pulpit of a Mosul     dawn Monday, launching
city.                          of Iraq’s Kurdistan region.   it would take to reach the        mosque.                        the country’s toughest bat-
Iraq’s Kurdish peshmerga       Peshmerga commanders          city itself, where more than      If successful, the liberation  tle since American troops
fighters led the initial as-   on the ground estimated       1 million people still live. Aid  of the city would be the       withdrew from Iraq nearly
sault, advancing slowly        the offensive retook nine     groups have warned of             biggest blow yet to the Is-    five years ago.
across open fields littered    villages and pushed the       a mass exodus of civilians        lamic State group. After a
with booby-trapped ex-         frontline with IS back eight  that could overwhelm refu-        string of victories by Iraqi       Continued on Next Page