Iraqi forces aim to secure Mosul bridge, link up to east bank

US-backed Iraqi forces pushed deeper into western Mosul on Sunday, aiming to capture a bridge across the Tigris which would link the city’s government-held eastern bank with the ongoing offensive against remaining militants in the west.

The bridge is the southernmost of five bridges spanning the Tigris. All were damaged in strikes by the US-led air coalition, and later by Daesh fighters trying to seal off the western bank still under their control.

“The bridge is very important,” Colonel Falah al-Wabdan of the Interior Ministry’s Rapid Response unit, one of the two main forces spearheading the campaign in western Mosul, told Reuters.

The bridge is about 400 metres away. By the end of the day you will hear that our forces have arrived (there).

Army engineers plan to rehabilitate the bridge to allow troops to bring in reinforcements and supplies directly from the eastern side, he said.

Iraqi forces captured eastern Mosul in January, after 100 days of fighting. They launched their attack on the districts that lie west of the Tigris a week ago.

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If they defeat Daesh in Mosul, that would crush the Iraq wing of the so-called caliphate that the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared in 2014 over parts of Iraq and neighbouring Syria. The US commander in Iraq has said he believes US-backed forces will recapture both Mosul and Raqqa – Daesh’s Syria stronghold – within six months.

Army, police, and elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) and Rapid Response units forces are attacking Daesh in west Mosul, with air and ground support from the US-led coalition, including artillery fire. US personnel are operating close to the frontlines to direct air strikes.

Hundreds of people have fled the fighting in the direction of government lines since Thursday, at least 1,200 of them in the early hours of Sunday, according to a CTS officer.

Of those, several dozen had been forcibly taken into Mosul in the early stage of the offensive from nearby regions to serve as human shields.

“We want to return to our home in Mafraq al-Qayyara,” south of Mosul, said 28-year-old Mohammad Allawi Zeidan, as he walked with a group of two dozen people on an agricultural road between Mosul airport and the Tigris river nearby.

He said they were held hostage in Hawi al-Josaq, a riverside district that the Rapid Response unit is trying to capture on its way towards the bridge.

Daesh forced tens of thousands of people to leave villages south of Mosul and walk alongside the militants as they retreated in late October toward the city. Thousands of them were freed in earlier stages of the offensive.

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