NATION/WORLD
Saturday, November 5, 2016
East Oregonian
Page 11A
Heavy fighting as Iraqi troops drive deeper into Mosul
By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA
and SUSANNAH GEORGE
Associated Press
MOSUL, Iraq — Iraqi special
forces launched a two-pronged
assault deeper into Mosul’s urban
center on Friday, unleashing the
most intense street battles against
Islamic State militants since the
offensive began nearly three weeks
ago.
Smoke rose across eastern
neighborhoods of Iraq’s second-
largest city as heavy fighting
continued after sundown, with
explosions and machine gun fire
echoing in the streets as mosques
called for evening prayer.
More than 3,000 Iraqi troops
took part in the assault under heavy
U.S.-led coalition air support, but
the pace of the fight also slowed
as Iraqi forces moved from
fighting in more rural areas with
few civilians to the tight, narrow
streets of Mosul proper. Sniper fire
repeatedly stalled the advance, as
commanders called in airstrikes
or artillery support after coming
under fire.
As the operation got underway,
columns of armored vehicles
wound through the desert, pushing
through dirt berms and drawing
heavy fire as they closed in on the
middle-class Tahrir and Zahara
districts. The area was once named
after former Iraqi dictator Saddam
Hussein.
Seven suicide attackers in
explosives-laden vehicles barreled
toward the troops, with two
getting through and detonating
their charges, Lt. Col. Muhanad
al-Timimi told The Associated
Press. The others were destroyed,
including a bulldozer that was hit
by an airstrike from the U.S.-led
coalition supporting the offensive.
At least seven special forces
troops were killed and an officer
and three soldiers were wounded,
said an Iraqi military officer who
spoke on condition of anonymity
because he was not permitted to
brief reporters.
“The operation is going well,
but it’s slow. These kinds of
advances are always slow,” said
Iraqi special forces Capt. Malik
Hameed, as IS fighters could be
seen running in the distance to
reposition themselves. “If we tried
to go any faster we would take
even more injuries.”
AP Photo/Felipe Dana
Children play next to a burning oil field in Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq, Thursday. A senior military
commander says more than 5,000 civilians have been evacuated from newly-retaken eastern parts of
the Islamic State group-held city of Mosul and taken to camps.
AP Photo/Marko Drobnjakovic
Iraqi special forces soldiers move in formation Friday in an alley on
the outskirts of Mosul, Iraq.
An Iraqi television journalist
traveling in a Humvee was
wounded in one of the suicide car
bomb attacks.
Earlier, at the eastern approach
to the city’s urban center, militants
holed up in a building fired a rocket
at an Iraqi Abrams tank, disabling
it and sending its crew fleeing from
the smoking vehicle. The advance
in that area then stalled.
The push began as dawn broke
with artillery and mortar strikes
on the Aden, Tahrir, and Quds
districts, just west of the special
forces’ footholds in the Gogjali and
Karama neighborhoods, al-Timimi
said.
On the heels of the special
forces advances, the Iraqi army’s
ninth division moved into the
eastern Intisar neighborhood, said
If Trump loses, backers threaten to
keep fighting as ‘movement’ lives on
SELMA, N.C. (AP) —
Donald Trump’s legions
of followers say they’re
growing confident of victory
— and many say they won’t
accept defeat.
“We’re going to win. And
if we don’t win and Hillary
wins, I think we’re going to
take over the government,”
said Nancy Fraize, 51, who
works as a cleaning lady in
Manchester, New Hamp-
shire. “I think personally
we’ll all be at the White
House sitting on the front
lawn. In arms.”
Her view of the possible
outcome and aftermath are
hardly rare. Poll numbers
show an uncertain race and
renewed scrutiny of Hillary
Clinton’s emails just before
Election Day, and a survey
last month showed only
one-third of Republicans
saying they have confidence
the votes will be counted
fairly.
The blend of confidence
in Trump and distrust of
those in power was reflected
again and again in more
than two dozen interviews
with his supporters across
battleground states where
the presidential race is being
fought.
Trump backers are nearly
uniformly confident about
their candidate’s prospects,
despite the controversies
that have surrounded his
campaign all year and
opinion polls that show him
trailing Clinton in potentially
decisive states. Many of
those interviewed agree with
the Republican nominee’s
incendiary assertion that the
election could be “rigged,”
an unprecedented challenge
to the nation’s democratic
tradition.
The New York busi-
nessman speaks of his
supporters as “a movement,”
one drawn by his celebrity,
his fiery populist rhetoric
and his denunciations of
Democrat Clinton as the
embodiment of an establish-
ment Washington that many
Americans feel has forgotten
about them.
“It’s about time we had
someone with the balls
to get things done,” said
Lugene Martin, 51, of Eau
Claire, Wisconsin. “I’m so
tired of this country being
led by same-old, same-old
politicians. We need one
who won’t follow the
rules.”
“If he lost?” she asked
herself. “I don’t even know
what I’d do.”
From early in his candi-
dacy, Trump has drawn
super-fans, those who have
attended several rallies and
watched the internet live
streams of many more.
Paula Pierce, 63, who
attended a Trump rally in
New Hampshire last week,
said the election “feels very
different this time,” as if the
country has reached a historic
turning point. Trump, she
said, “has ignited a move-
ment, a fire.”
The Education Foundation of Pendleton presents:
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an officer from the unit who spoke
on condition of anonymity because
he was not authorized to speak to
the media.
On Tuesday, Iraqi troops
entered the city limits for the first
time in more than two years, after a
demoralized Iraqi army fled in the
face of the Islamic State group’s
2014 blitz across large swaths of
territory in Iraq and neighboring
Syria.
The operation to retake Mosul
is expected to take weeks if not
months. Moving from neighbor-
hood to neighborhood in house-
to-house battles through dense
warrens of booby-trapped build-
ings is time consuming and Iraq’s
military has repeatedly opted for
slower operations in an effort to
minimize casualties.
Some 1 million civilians still
remain in the city, complicating
the advance. IS militants have
driven thousands of residents
deeper into the city’s built-up
areas to be used as human shields,
while hundreds of others have fled
toward
government-controlled
territory and thousands have fled
west into Syria.
Just a few miles from Friday’s
operation, dozens of cars queued
up on the road to camps for
displaced Mosul residents.
“We suffered and there was
bombing and heavy shelling. We
didn’t feel safe,” said Mahmoud
Mahdi, who was fleeing the now
government-held Gogjali neigh-
borhood. “Everybody is displaced
and walking around in this heat. It
is exhausting.”
Mosul is the last major IS strong-
hold in Iraq, and expelling the
militant group from the city would
be a major blow to the survival of
its self-declared “caliphate” that
stretches into Syria.
Iraqi forces have made uneven
progress in closing in on the city
since the operation began on Oct.
17. Advances have been slower
from the south, with government
troops still some 20 miles away.
Kurdish fighters and Iraqi army
units are deployed to the north,
while
government-sanctioned
Shiite militias are sweeping in
from the west to try to cut off any
IS escape route.
As the sun began to set Friday,
special forces troops fanned out
across the city blocks retaken in the
fighting. Guided by intelligence
from U.S.-led coalition surveil-
lance of the area, they knocked
on the doors of homes where they
believed civilians were living.
Moving from street to street,
Capt. Hameed and his men found
four families and an elderly couple
in the sector they were assigned to
clear. After sweeping the rooms for
weapons, they questioned the male
heads of household.
“Who were the IS fighters
responsible for this neighbor-
hood?” special forces Maj. Ahmed
al-Mamouri asked an elderly man.
“They were Arabs, but not Iraqi.
Foreign,” the man said pointing to
the houses where the fighters lived
and worked.
As his children served the Iraqi
soldiers tea, the man described
where and when he saw the IS
militants flee and the weapons
they had. Al-Mamouri pulled out
satellite images of central Mosul
and asked the man to identify
checkpoints and buildings where
he believed the fighters were
making explosives.
“This is all to help with our
operation
moving
forward,”
al-Mamouri said. “This is almost
more important than the clashes.”
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