Shi'ite militias launch offensive to seal off western Mosul
Iraqi Shi'ite militias launched an offensive toward the west of Mosul on October 30, an operation that will tighten the noose around Islamic State's Iraq stronghold but has alarmed Turkey and could inflame tensions in the mainly Sunni area.
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A spokesman for the Shi'ite militias, known as the Hashid Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) forces, said thousands of fighters "started operations this morning to clean up the hotbeds of Daesh (Islamic State) in the western parts of Mosul".
The city is by far the largest held by the ultra-hardline Sunni Islamic State and its loss would mark their effective defeat in Iraq, two years after their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a cross-border caliphate in parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque.
The Shi'ite militias aim to capture villages west of Mosul and reach the town of Tal Afar, about 55 km (35 miles) from the city, the Hashid spokesman said. Their goal is to cut off any option of retreat by Islamic State insurgents into neighboring Syria or any reinforcement for their defense of Mosul.
But their deployment close to the border with neighboring Turkey prompted a warning from President Tayyip Erdogan, who said Ankara aims to reinforce its troops on the frontier and threatened a "different response" for the militias if they "unleash terror" in Tal Afar.
Turkish troops have been training Sunni tribal combatants at an Iraqi camp northeast of Mosul, but a spokesman for the Shi'ite militias said earlier on October 30 the Turks were in no position to obstruct their advance.
The Iran-backed and battle-hardened paramilitaries bring additional firepower to the nearly two-week-old campaign to recapture Iraq's second largest city from the jihadist group.
Iraqi soldiers and security forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, backed by a US-led air coalition and thousands of Western military personnel, have been advancing in the last 13 days on the southern, eastern and northeastern fronts around Mosul, which remains home to 1.5 million people.
