An Iraqi soldier stands over a man alleged to be an Islamic State (IS) group member as civilians flee the Old City of Mosul, on July 3, 2017. (FADEL SENNA/AFP/Getty Images)
The Islamic State group controls less than 5 percent of the western half of Mosul as of Monday in an area less than a square mile, military officials say, reducing what was once its self-proclaimed capital in Iraq to a besieged island of extremists encircled by troops loyal to Baghdad.
Forces from the elite Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service, the federal police, the regular Iraqi army and the Emergency Response Division have fully surrounded the extremists in the old part of Iraq's second-largest city and are fighting through the winding, narrow streets to root them out of their remaining entrenched positions, Air Force Brig Gen. Andrew Croft said in a phone interview with U.S. News from the U.S.-led coalition headquarters in Baghdad.
"All those forces are now turned and focused all on an axis on ISIS from what we call 'Old Mosul,'" says Croft, deputy commander for air operations in Operation Inherent Resolve, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group. "It becomes very difficult to attack into that because it's just such a concentrated mass of buildings."
Despite the continued hard fighting, the Iraqi security forces, or ISF, scored a major coup in liberating the al-Jumhuri hospital complex in west Mosul over the weekend, Croft says, with buildings that comprise some of the highest territory in the city.
"ISF liberated that thing, and put their big Iraqi flag on the tallest building. It was sort of their Iwo Jima," Croft says, citing the iconic image of six Marines raising the American flag on the peak of Mount Suribachi near the end of the grueling World War II battle.
The U.S.-led coalition steadily provided air support for ground forces operating in Mosul in recent weeks with between one and four strikes every day for the last month. Recent strikes have killed dozens of fighters and snipers, as well as destroyed tunnels, fighting positions and ammunition caches.
The three-year-old campaign to defeat the Islamic State group following its dramatic rise in 2014 now focuses on its symbolic capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa, which local forces backed by the U.S. re-entered over the weekend for the first time since the war began.
Paul D. Shinkman is a national security reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow him on Twitter or reach him at pshinkman@usnews.com
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