Mosul battle to begin in Oct – anti-IS coalition commander
The battle to retake Mosul, the so-called Islamic State’s last Iraqi stronghold, will begin within October, said the new US-led coalition commander.
In a Wall Street Journal interview, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, however, said that the push to reclaim Raqqa, the group’s self-declared capital in Syria, was “on hold.” Townsend, in response to two questions at his office in Baghdad, said “yeah, yeah, I think you’ll see that” the Mosul offensive would begin “in the next month,” without providing a precise date.
In Raqqa, the operation has been “hampered by Turkish tensions with the US-backed rebel force led by Syrian Kurds that is expected to participate in the assault,” the newspaper reported.
Iraqi forces backed by coalition support will be faced with a “hard fight, a long, difficult fight” in Mosul, he said.
Some 3,000-4,500 IS fighters remain the city, he said, a third of whom are “the hardest-core fighter who will essentially die in place.” But he also expected that many of them may be opportunists who have a “Daesh flag in one pocket and an Iraqi flag in the other,” he said, using the Arabic acronym of the group’s name.
Meanwhile, Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman US Air Force Col. John Dorrian said at a Pentagon press conference that he did not want to put a clear time frame on the operation, adding that the decision would left to the Iraqi government.
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