Elite Iraqi forces battled house by house in the Old City of Mosul on Saturday, inching towards the mosque where the ISIS group proclaimed its “caliphate” in 2014, a spokesman said.
Commanders said progress in the densely populated warren of alleyways was slow but that Government forces had made new gains from ISIS in the heart of their last major urban bastion in Iraq. “Our forces are 800 metres (yards) from the mosque,” said Captain Firas al-Zuwaidi, spokesman for the interior ministry’s elite Rapid Response Force. He was referring to the Al-Nuri Mosque, where ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the cross-border “caliphate” spanning jehad-controlled territory in Iraq and Syria in his sole public appearance in July 2014. “We are encountering difficulties — bad weather and streets too narrow for our military vehicles which cannot enter,” Zuwaidi said. “The fighting is street by street, house by house,” he said, as the sound of mortar fire rang out from the heart of Iraq’s second city.