Daesh VIDEO: Islamic State Militants’ Footage Portrays Iraq’s Mosul Fightback

Tue Oct 18, 2016 08:35:34

As Iraqi government forces launched an offensive on Monday (October 17) to drive Islamic State (ISIS / Daesh / ISIL) from the northern city of Mosul, the terrorist group’s news agency Amaq released video it said showed it fighting back.

The video, Amaq said, showed Islamic State fighters destroying an Iraqi army tank with a missile.

Amaq also on Monday uploaded images it said showed al-Hurriya Bridge — one of the main crossing points of the Tigris River in Mosul and a key supply line for Islamic State — partially destroyed.

Witnesses said the bridge had been hit by an airstrike on Sunday (October 16), and Islamic State (ISIS / Daesh / ISIL) said it had been carried out by US war planes.

Two years after the terrorists seized Mosul — a city of 1.5 million people — and declared a caliphate from there encompassing tracts of Iraq and Syria, a force of some 30,000 Iraqi army troops, Kurdish peshmerga forces and Sunni tribal fighters have begun an advance to seize it.

A US-led air campaign has helped push Islamic State (ISIS / Daesh / ISIL) from much of the territory it held but 4,000 to 8,000 fighters are thought to remain in northern Iraqi city.

There are already more than three million people displaced in Iraq as a result of conflicts involving Islamic State and up to 100,000 Iraqis may flee Mosul to Syria and Turkey.

Medicine is in short supply in Mosul and food prices have risen sharply, Reuters reported.

S/SH 11

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