By TIM ARANGO, ERIC SCHMITT and RUKMINI CALLIMACHIDEC.<\/p>\n
ISTANBUL \u2014 After two months, the battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State has settled into a grinding war of attrition. The front lines have barely budged in weeks. Casualties of Iraqi security forces are so high that American commanders heading the United States-led air campaign worry that they are unsustainable. Civilians are being killed or injured by Islamic State snipers and growing numbers of suicide bombers.<\/p>\n
As the world watches the horrors unfolding in Aleppo, Syria, where government forces and allied militias bombed civilians and carried out summary executions as they retook the last rebel-held areas, a different tragedy is transpiring in Mosul. Up to one million people are trapped inside the city, running low on food and drinking water and facing the worsening cruelty of Islamic State fighters.<\/p>\n
\u201cISIS members have become like mad dogs, and every member has the power of immediate execution,\u201d Abu Noor said by telephone from his home on the west side of Mosul, which government forces had not reached, referring to the terror group by one of its acronyms. \u201cWe live in constant fear and worry.\u201d
\nAs the fight drags on, it is looking more and more likely that Mosul will become one of the first national security issues facing President-elect Donald J. Trump when he takes office next month. While American forces have largely steered clear of the fighting in Syria, they are deeply involved in operations just over the border in Iraq, mainly in training, advising and support roles.
\nSenior American officials and top commanders in the Middle East say the brutal urban fight for Mosul is succeeding \u2014 however slowly \u2014 but is proving to be tougher than expected. These officials predict that the battle to oust the Islamic State from Iraq\u2019s second-largest city could last two to four more months.
\nBrett H. McGurk, President Obama\u2019s envoy to the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, noted at a recent White House briefing that previous battles against the terror group, as in Falluja, in Iraq, or Ramadi or Kobani, in Syria, took months, and said that eventually the Islamic State would exhaust its supply of munitions and fighters.
\n\u201cEventually they reach a culmination point, they simply cannot resupply, they run out of suicide bombers,\u201d Mr. McGurk said. \u201cIn Mosul, we don\u2019t know when that will come. It could come very soon, it could come a couple months from now, but our momentum will be sustained and we\u2019ll provide relentless pressure on the enemy throughout Mosul.\u201d
\nLt. Gen. Stephen Townsend gave Pentagon reporters a year-end update that made no prediction on how soon Mosul would be liberated. \u201cIt\u2019s progressing. It\u2019s probably not progressing as fast as I, as a U.S. Army officer, would like, but it is progressing, and the Iraqis are advancing every day,\u201d he said.
\nGeneral Townsend said the Iraqis were engaged in discussions \u201cabout how to inject new energy\u201d into their assault. \u201cWe\u2019re just going to let it go at the pace\u201d of the Iraqi military, he said. \u201cThey\u2019re the ones doing the fighting and the dying.\u201d
\nThe battle for Mosul has shaped up unlike any other in Iraq. As Iraqi forces have advanced, they have uncovered Islamic State bomb-making facilities that have stunned soldiers and researchers in their sophistication, indicating that it could be a long time before the group runs out of arms.
\nA recent report from Conflict Armament Research, a London-based organization that sent a team of researchers to eastern Mosul, said the Islamic State had been producing rockets and mortars on an \u201cindustrial\u201d scale inside Mosul.
\nTens of thousands of armaments have been produced, the organization said, with supplies from Turkey, which in the last year has tightened its border security and clamped down on Islamic State smuggling networks in the face of criticism from allies, including the United States, that it was turning a blind eye to the terror group.
\nThe findings, the group said, indicate \u201ca robust supply chain extending from Turkey, through Syria, to Mosul,\u201d suggesting that Turkey\u2019s efforts at the border have not been enough to cut off the Islamic State from suppliers.
\nShakir Mahmood, a soldier in Iraq\u2019s elite counterterror forces, fought in battles in Ramadi, Falluja and Tikrit, but they were nothing like the fight he has faced in Mosul, he said.
\n\u201cI have never seen or witnessed a battle like the battle for Mosul,\u201d he said. \u201cThey have so many snipers hiding in the houses among civilians, and also many car bombs. Our losses in this battle cannot be compared with the other battles.\u201d
\nAnother veteran soldier, Ibrahim Ali, said: \u201cI have seen things in Mosul that I will never forget my whole life. I have seen entire families get killed because of ISIS car bombs. And I have lost dear friends in Mosul.\u201d
\nThe Iraqi government does not release figures of military casualties, but it is clear in talking to officers that they are worrisomely high. The United Nations reported on Dec. 1 that 1,959 members of the Iraqi security forces had died in November. But after the Iraqi military protested, the United Nations issued a new statement saying its figures were \u201clargely unverified\u201d and said it would discontinue releasing casualty statistics for the military.
\nWhen the battle started, in mid-October, it moved fairly quickly as forces took outlying areas that had mostly been empty of civilians.
\nJournalists were given wide access to the front lines. But recently, getting the news out of Mosul has become more difficult; commanders are prohibiting most front-line embeds.
\nThe tightening of access, apparently, was not an effort to control the narrative, but a reaction to the recent appearance in Mosul of Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy, the French philosopher and writer, who is producing a documentary film about the battle. Why was that controversial? Because Mr. Levy is Jewish.
\nHis appearance stirred outrage in Iraq, and the authorities in Baghdad moved to shut down access for all journalists.
\nBy The New York Times
\n\u201cThe rumor spread that we were having relations with Israel,\u201d said Lt. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a special forces commander in Mosul, who said he had no idea who Mr. Levy was when he arrived. \u201cIn fact, we had no idea who this was that came to see us.\u201d
\nHe said access for journalists would be restored soon. \u201cWe will solve this problem,\u201d he said.
\nCivilian casualties are soaring, even though the government, at the outset of the battle, dropped millions of leaflets over the city with instructions to stay inside their homes. Most civilians have, but those who have fled \u2014 there are some 90,000 people displaced from their homes around the city \u2014 have faced harrowing journeys, and many have been killed or maimed by crossfire.
\nThat so many civilians have remained has hampered the fight, as Iraqi soldiers move slowly in an effort to protect them. It has also led to limited use of air power and artillery.
\n\u201cEssentially, they are trying a different operational approach,\u201d said Carl Castellano, a senior analyst at Talos, a consulting firm that focuses on security in Iraq. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the capability to evacuate all these civilians, and so that\u2019s limiting the amount of firepower they can use in the city. That is limiting their options in terms of what they can do \u2014 close air support and everything else.\u201d
\nAmerican air commanders have quickly sought to modify some of their bombing runs to counter shifting tactics by the Islamic State, cratering streets in Mosul with bombs to stymie car-bombers or at least slow them down, and stepping up attacks on car bomb factories in and around Mosul. Allied warplanes have destroyed nearly 140 car bombs or car-bomb factories since the Mosul offensive began, American officials said.
\nIn the second week of December, nearly 700 civilians were wounded, from gunshots, mines and rocket fire, according to the United Nations, a 30 percent increase from the previous week.
\nMany of the injured wind up in the emergency rooms of hospitals in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region.
\nOn a recent day, Saleh Hassoun sat in a hospital in Erbil, less than an hour\u2019s drive from Mosul, at the bedside of his 1-year-old granddaughter, who had been wounded by a mine.
\n\u201cThe mines are everywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cThe one that we set off was on the ground, and attached to a tiny cable. We didn\u2019t see it, and the explosion killed both of my daughters and injured my granddaughter.\u201d
\nA woman in the hospital, Umm Ussam, 54, had been shot through the neck. At first, she obeyed the instructions of the Iraqi Army to stay indoors, but once the military arrived she ran behind one of the Humvees, only to be picked off by a sniper, she said.
\nFor those who did stay home and whose areas are now liberated, there are new challenges, and fears, not to mention a lack of services and a dwindling supply of safe drinking water.
\n\u201cThe government forces said stay in your houses, but our houses are without electricity or water,\u201d said Sabah Kareem, whose neighborhood of eastern Mosul is now under government control. \u201cWe are amid hell. We don\u2019t know when we will be bombed, or if ISIS will return to kill us.\u201d
\nTim Arango reported from Istanbul; Eric Schmitt from Doha, Qatar; and Rukmini Callimachi from Erbil, Iraq. Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an employee of The New York Times from Erbil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By TIM ARANGO, ERIC SCHMITT and RUKMINI CALLIMACHIDEC. ISTANBUL \u2014 After two months, the battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State has settled into a grinding war of attrition. The front lines have barely budged in weeks. Casualties of Iraqi security forces are so high that American commanders heading the …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5285],"tags":[6283,6285,6284],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}