Near Mosul, Iraqis face ISIS car bombs

First American is killed in operation

Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces advance Thursday toward the city of Mosul, Iraq.
Iraq’s elite counterterrorism forces advance Thursday toward the city of Mosul, Iraq.

BARTELLA, Iraq -- Elite Iraqi special forces joined the battle for Mosul on Thursday, unleashing a pre-dawn assault on an Islamic State-held town east of the besieged city. The U.S. military announced the first American combat death since the operation began.

As they charged toward the town of Bartella, 9 miles from Mosul's outskirts, the Iraqi special forces faced another favored weapon in the Islamic State arsenal: armored trucks packed with explosives and driven by suicide bombers. The militants' signature battlefield tactic, the weapons offered a glimpse at what Iraqi forces can expect as they close in on the extremists' biggest urban bastion.

The assault on Bartella was part of a multipronged operation on eastern approaches to Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city. Attack helicopters strafed militant positions as they advanced through a hail of gunfire.

The U.S.-trained special forces, officially known as the Counter Terrorism Service, are widely seen as Iraq's most professional and least sectarian fighters and have served as the shock troops in previous campaigns against the Islamic State militants. They are expected to lead the charge into Mosul. The Islamic State also is known as ISIS.

Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi said Mosul may fall sooner than expected. The campaign to retake the city, which began Monday, had been expected to last weeks, if not months.

Speaking by video transmission to a conference in Paris focused on post-liberation planning for Mosul, the Iraqi leader said the Iraqi "forces are currently pushing forward ... more quickly than we thought, and more quickly certainly than we established in our plan of campaign."

U.S. officials said the American service member died Thursday from wounds after a roadside bomb explosion north of Mosul. More than 100 U.S. special operations forces are embedded with Iraqi units in the offensive, and hundreds more are playing a support role in staging bases.

U.S. Central Command announced the death in a brief statement saying the service member was wounded by an "improvised explosive device."

The American had been advising members of the Iraqi Kurdish force known as the peshmerga, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss details.

The American's identity was being withheld pending notification of his family.

He was the fourth U.S. combat death in Iraq since the U.S. began military operations against the Islamic State group with airstrikes in August 2014.

There are approximately 4,800 U.S. troops in Iraq, according to the Pentagon. That doesn't include another 1,500 troops considered there "on temporary duty," whose number changes daily, according to the U.S. officials.

Defenses built up

Roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices pose a particular danger to advancing Iraqi forces and the U.S. advisers with them. The Islamic State group, which has occupied Mosul for more than two years, has prepared extensive defenses in and around the city.

Islamic State militants set off at least nine suicide car and truck bombs against the advancing troops, eight of which were destroyed before reaching their targets, while the ninth struck an armored Humvee, Lt. Col Muntadhar al-Shimmari said.

He did not give a casualty figure, but another officer said five Iraqi soldiers were wounded. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release information.

Lt. Gen. Abdelwahab al-Saedi, a commander with the counterterrorism units, said the militants were fighting hard for villages and towns on the city's outskirts to keep the fight out of Mosul, where the presence of civilians prevents them from heavily booby-trapping areas.

"They always focus on their outer lines," he said, as he watched the battle from an observation point on the outskirts of Bartella. "They use these car bombs to try and shock us."

"After we break them in Bartella, everywhere else, they will crumble," Maj. Gen. Fadhil Barwari said. He added that Islamic State militants had few defenses in the town, which was almost completely empty of civilians. "They just left some snipers and suicide car bombs," he said.

The elite units have been at the front of nearly every other battle against the militants in Iraq, and they expect to be the first to break into Mosul. "We're the only ones with the capability," Saedi said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Kurdish forces announced a simultaneous attack, with peshmerga fighters deployed on mountains northeast of Mosul descending from their positions and charging toward the front line.

Under cover of mortar rounds and gunfire, the Kurdish troops used bulldozers and other heavy equipment to fill trenches dug by the militants as part of their defense of the Islamic State-held village of Barima, then advanced with their armored vehicles toward the extremists' positions.

Military operations also appeared to be underway in the town of Bashiqa, northeast of Mosul, where plumes of thick smoke could be seen. A day earlier, Bashiqa was pounded by airstrikes and mortar fire from peshmerga positions high above.

Lt. Gen. Talib Shaghati said at a news conference late Thursday that the special forces had succeeded in retaking Bartella. But Iraqi forces were still facing stiff resistance inside the town shortly before he spoke, and past advances against the Islamic State militants elsewhere in Iraq often have proved fleeting.

Soldiers stationed a few miles from Bartella said they watched as some 20 car bombs exploded in the town over the course of the day, each one sending smoke into the air. By late afternoon the skies over Bartella were black.

The Islamic State group has used the tactic in past battles to wreak havoc among front-line troops, but Iraqi forces have become better at stopping the suicide attackers.

"We destroyed the bombs with tanks," Sgt. Maj. Qusay Rashid said. "They are sending all these car bombs now because we're at the beginning of this huge battle. They are trying to put up their best defense."

After Bartella, Iraqi forces advancing toward Mosul will begin to hit villages and suburbs where civilians still live, a factor that will further complicate military operations that rely heavily on artillery and airstrikes to clear territory.

Care for the displaced

Mosul is home to more than 1 million people, and rights groups fear a potential humanitarian crisis.

Aid workers struggled to provide emergency supplies to people fleeing the conflict; so far, 1,900 people displaced from Mosul have been moved to an airstrip west of Qayyarah, a town about 35 miles to the south that has been recaptured from the militants, and given aid.

The International Organization for Migration, which is coordinating some of the aid, said it planned to erect two large tents starting Monday to accommodate as many as 60,000 Iraqis displaced by the conflict.

"The Mosul campaign, in a worst-case scenario, is expected to be the largest and most complex humanitarian operation in the world in 2016 due to mass forced displacement of people fleeing military operations," the organization said in a statement.

The Islamic State captured Mosul and the surrounding area during a lightning advance across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, and Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the formation of a self-styled caliphate from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque.

Iraqi forces crumbled that summer, beating a humiliating retreat and leaving weapons and vehicles behind. But the special forces held together and fought back, and since then they have played a central role in retaking cities and towns from the extremist group.

The Iraqi special forces were created by the U.S. shortly after the 2003 invasion to hunt down top insurgents and stage commando raids, but the troops' mandate has since expanded. The force includes Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and its human-rights record is better than other forces taking part in the Mosul operation.

Mosul is a Sunni majority town, and many fear the involvement of state-sanctioned Shiite militias in the operation could stoke sectarian tensions. The Shiite militias have said they will not enter the city itself.

But even among the special forces there are traces of sectarian fervor. Many of the black Humvees that rode into battle in Bartella were decked with Shiite religious banners in addition to Iraqi flags.

Ali Saad, a 26-year-old special forces soldier, said Kurdish forces had asked them to take down the religious banners, but they refused.

"They asked if we were militias. We said we're not militias, we are Iraqi forces, and these are our beliefs," he said.

Information for this article was contributed by Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Susannah George, Robert Burns, Lolita C. Baldor, Joseph Krauss, Sinan Salaheddin, Adam Schreck and Balint Szlanko of The Associated Press; by Michael R. Gordon and Kamil Kakol of The New York Times; and by Loveday Morris and Kareem Fahim of The Washington Post.

A Section on 10/21/2016

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