An Iraqi officer says U.S.-backed Iraqi forces are moving to surround Mosul's Old City a week after launching a fresh push to drive Islamic State militants from areas they still hold.

Iraqi special forces Lt. Gen. Sami al-Arathi said Thursday that battle plans changed and a northern advance was launched last week after Iraqi forces struggled to push into the Old City from the south.

The operation to retake Mosul began nearly seven months ago, and the eastern half of the city was retaken earlier this year. The battle for the more densely populated western half, including the Old City, has been slower.

The U.N. estimates some 350,000 people remain trapped in IS-held Mosul. Clashes over the past week have forced more than 11,000 civilians to flee. </s> 750,000 Iraqis are trapped in the western part of the city as Iraqi forces fight house to house to force ISIL out.

A humanitarian crisis on the verge of stretching aid agencies to breaking point - that's how the UN coordinator in Iraq describes the situation in western Mosul.

Around 150,000 Iraqis have been forced from their homes during the last month of fighting, with more expected.

Many have found shelter in camps, which aid workers say are overwhelmed.

Iraqi forces are battling ISIL in western areas of Mosul.

ISIL fighters are resisting with car bombs, snipers and drones laden with grenades to slow the Iraqi army advance.

Western Mosul, which includes the Old City, is densely populated with civilians who are caught in the cross-fire.

Will Mosul's liberation end the plight of the displaced? </s> Iraqi police say the recapture of al-Kur and al-Tawafa will enable civilians to move to safer areas.

Iraqi forces in Mosul have said they have captured two key neighbourhoods in its offensive to retake the western part of the city from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).

Adel Ahmed, the captain of the federal police, said control of the al-Kur and al-Tawafa will allow for a safe corridor for civilians to leave the city.

“Liberating both districts will allow opening secured corridors for the exit of civilians to safer areas,” he told the DPA news agency.

Ahmed also said Saturday's advance followed intense clashes between Iraqi forces and ISIL fighters.

The Iraqi military launched the most recent offensive on western Mosul, the largest remaining ISIL stronghold in Iraq, on February 19.

On Wednesday, Iraqi forces took control of a main bridge leading to the city and advanced towards the mosque where ISIL's leader declared a "caliphate" in 2014.

Nearly 100,000 Iraqis have fled western Mosul over the past three weeks, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Wednesday.

The Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration said that as many as 600,000 civilians remained trapped in neighbourhoods of west Mosul.

IN PICTURES: The battle for western Mosul

The operation in the city officially began in October last year. In January, its eastern half was declared "fully liberated". </s> ISIL positions in city's west targeted as Iraqi troops close in on mosque from where Baghdadi declared his caliphate.

Iraqi army helicopters are firing rockets at ISIL positions in Mosul's Old City as troops on the ground close in on al-Nuri Mosque, a centuries-old structure famous for its leaning minaret.

Federal Police troops advanced past the train station in western Mosul closer to the mosque on Sunday. A police commander said they were very close to taking control of it.

Residents fled from the area, carrying bags of belongings and picking their way through the wrecked buildings as shells and gunfire echoed behind them. Most of them were women and children.

"Federal Police and Rapid Response forces resumed their advance after halting operations due to bad weather. The troops have a target of retaking the rest of the Old City," a police spokesman said.

The battle to recapture the last stronghold of ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, in Iraq has now entered its sixth month.

Iraqi government forces, backed by US advisers, artillery and air support, have cleared the east and half of western Mosul and are now focused on controlling the Old City.

Recent fighting has targeted the strategic al-Nuri Mosque. Its capture would be a blow for ISIL, also known as ISIS, as it was from there that leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in July 2014 after the group had seized chunks of Iraq and Syria.

US officials estimate about 2,000 ISIL fighters remain inside Mosul, Iraq's second largest city, resisting with mortar fire, snipers and suicide car bombs that attack army positions.

The black ISIL flag still flew from the mosque's minaret on Sunday.

Al Jazeera's Stefanie Dekker, reporting from east Mosul, said thousands of civilians were trying to escape the fighting.

"We have been hearing many stories from people feeling western Mosul - civilians caught in the middle, being killed by all sides in the conflict. The numbers seem alarmingly high. So far the exact toll has been impossible to confirm," she said.

"As Iraqi forces push further into the heart of western Mosul, the more resistance they face, especially since the battle has now reached the outskirts of the densely populated Old City. ISIL is using a seemingly never ending supply of suicide car bombers and snipers."

As many as 600,000 civilians may be caught inside the city with ISIL fighters.

About 255,000 people have been displaced from Mosul and surrounding areas since October, including more than 100,000 since the military campaign in western Mosul began on February 19, according to UN figures.

The last week has seen the highest level of displacement yet, with 32,000 displaced between March 12 and 15.

"The front lines haven't moved much over the last few days," our correspondent said.

"The weather was playing a role on this battlefield. When the sky is grey and it's raining, Iraqi advances are usually slowed, as the cloudy skies hinder pilots and their air support. ISIL also often uses the cover to carry out counter attacks.

"The weather also has an effect on the tens of thousands who are streaming out of Mosul, making their lives even more miserable."

Federal Police moved into the city on foot from near the train station towards the Old City, negotiating rubble-filled streets.

General Khalid al-Obedi, the police commander, said: "We are advancing toward the Old City. Their resistance is weakening. They are mostly using car bombs and that shows they are losing on the ground."

Meanwhile, Federal Police arrested Husam Sheet al-Jabouri, the local chief of Diwan al-Hisba, an ISIL unit responsible for enforcing strict Islamic rules, in Mosul's Bab al-Sijin area, a police statement said. </s> MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Thousands of Iraqis surged out of western Mosul on Saturday during a lull in heavy fighting in districts around the densely populated Old City where Iraqi forces are facing fierce resistance from Islamic State militants.

Displaced Iraqi people from different areas in Mosul flee their homes after clashes to reach safe areas, as Iraqi forces battle with Islamic State militants in the city of Mosul, Iraq March 18, 2017. REUTERS/Youssef Boudlal

Five months into the battle to take Islamic State’s last bastion in Iraq, government forces have cleared the east and half of western Mosul, and are now focused on controlling the Old City as well as the strategic al-Nuri Mosque.

As fighting has entered into the narrow alleyways and densely populated parts of the west, more residents are fleeing liberated areas where food and water are scarce, security fragile and where homes are often caught in shelling.

“We have been trapped for 25 days. No water, no food, everyone will die and they will have to pull us from the rubble,” said one resident of Bab Jdid district, not giving his name because relatives remained inside Mosul.

Families with elderly relatives and children marched through western Mosul’s muddy streets, past buildings pock-marked by bullet and bombs. Some said they had hardly eaten in weeks, scrambling for supplies handed out by a local aid agency.

“It is terrible, Islamic State have destroyed us. There is no food, no bread. There is absolutely nothing,” said another resident.

As many as 600,000 civilians may be caught inside the city with the militants.

Iraqi forces cut off Mosul from the remaining territory that Islamic State controls in Iraq and Syria. But even in liberated areas, many prefer to leave the city amid heavy fighting.

Around 255,000 people have been displaced from Mosul and surrounding areas since October, including more than 100,000 since the latest military campaign in western Mosul began on Feb. 19, according to United Nations figures.

The last week has seen the highest level of displacement yet, with 32,000 displaced between March 12 and 15.

Heavy rains and clouds this week restricted air cover and helicopters, slowing the advance of Federal Police and Rapid Response forces who are consolidating positions around the Old City and the al-Nuri Mosque.

“The weather is cloudy and rainy but our forces are advancing toward their targets,” Federal Police Major General Haider Dhirgham told reporters at the forward base inside Mosul. “In a few steps and strikes we will reach the Nuri mosque.”

As militants retreat into the confined streets of the Old City, Islamic State has been resisting with snipers, mortars and the armored suicide car bombs that plow into army positions.

The fall of Mosul would be a significant blow to Islamic State, whose leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi used the al-Nuri mosque to declare a self-proclaimed caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria in 2014.

Slideshow (4 Images)

U.S. officials have estimated that around 2,000 fighters remain inside the city. But even after the liberation of Mosul, there are risks that militants will return to the kind of guerrilla warfare and bombings they have used in the past.

(Click here for a graphic on 'Battle for Mosul' here) </s> As fighting continues between Iraqi forces and ISIL fighters, civilians have been fleeing the city in droves.

Mosul, Iraq - Last month, Iraqi forces resumed their assault on the city of Mosul, which has been under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group (ISIL, also known as ISIS) since 2014.

The eastern side of the city was recaptured in a three-month offensive that ended in January, but the west, with its densely populated maze of narrow streets, is thought to pose a greater challenge.

Surrounded by a diverse array of Iraqi forces, the remaining ISIL fighters are digging in for a fight to the end, using car bombs, snipers and grenade-laden drones to slow the troops' advances.

Meanwhile, civilians have been fleeing Mosul in droves, with tens of thousands more expected to be displaced as fighting continues in the weeks ahead. </s> U.S.-backed Iraqi forces were moving to surround Mosul's Old City on Thursday, a week after launching a fresh push to drive Islamic State militants from areas they still hold, according to an Iraqi officer overseeing the operation.

Iraqi special forces Lt. Gen. Sami al-Arathi said battle plans had changed and a northern advance was launched last week after Iraqi forces struggled to push into the Old City from the south.

As Iraqi army and federal police forces push from the north, the country's special forces are moving toward the Old City through Mosul's western industrial neighborhoods.

"The multi-axis advance ... has presented the enemy with more dilemmas than they can react to," U.S.-led coalition spokesman John Dorrian told reporters during a press conference Wednesday. Dorrian said over the past week Iraqi forces retook more than 30 square kilometers (12 square miles) of terrain from IS.

Hundreds of civilians could be seen fleeing the fighting Thursday.

A Mosul woman was given a cigarette by an Iraqi soldier, another was handed a cane. A handful of wounded civilians were evacuated from the front line, and a woman who appeared to have lost both her legs was rushed away on the hood of an armored vehicle.

The operation to retake Mosul began in October, and the eastern half of the city was retaken earlier this year. The battle for the more densely populated western half, including the Old City, has been slower. Mosul fell to IS nearly three years ago when the militant group blitzed into Iraq from neighboring Syria and took nearly a third of the country under its control. Today a fraction of western Mosul is the last significant urban terrain IS holds in Iraq.

The U.N. estimates some 350,000 people remain trapped in IS-held parts of western Mosul. Clashes over the past week have forced more than 11,000 civilians to flee.

Dorrian said while IS defenses in Mosul are "degraded" each day, it is still impossible to predict how much longer the operation will take.

Associated press writer Maya Alleruzzo in Mosul, Iraq, contributed to this report. </s> More room needed for people streaming from city to escape fighting between US-backed Iraqi forces and ISIL.

The United Nations has said it is expanding camps for displaced people around the battered Iraqi city of Mosul as the number of displaced people hit 300,000, and a US-backed assault on ISIL there continued.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that a total of 392,000 people had fled their homes since the Iraqi government offensive to push the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group from the city began in October. Some 94,500 have since returned, it said.

The International Organization for Migration puts the number of displaced at 302,400.

Mosul had a pre-campaign population of about a million and half, split more or less evenly between the sides lying east and west of the Tigris river that runs through its middle.

Iraqi forces captured the eastern side in January and in February launched a second phase to take the western side, with air and ground support from a US-led coalition.

They are now battling to take the northwestern part, but the civilian death toll has mounted in the densely populated Old City, where the fighters are dug in.

More people are expected to flee the fighting and camps for the displaced north and east of Mosul are expanding, the UN statement said.

Bombing raids on the city by the Iraqi air force resumed on Tuesday as the sky cleared after several days of bad weather, the Iraqi military said.

A number of ISIL commanders were killed in an air raid on a position in Hay al-Tanak, a stronghold of the group in the west of Mosul, the army said in statement.

Among those killed were commanders in charge of booby traps, of suicide fighters and child recruitment, the statement added, without identifying them by name.

The improved weather should also allow ground forces to resume their advance towards the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, where ISIL's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a "caliphate" nearly three years ago over parts of Iraq and Syria. </s> By Mustafa Salim, Kareem Fahim and Dan Lamothe, The Washington Post

IRBIL, Iraq – Iraqi forces resumed their offensive against the Islamic State in Mosul on Sunday after a weeks-long pause, aiming to capture the militant-controlled western half of the city, where the tight, impassable streets and teeming neighborhoods will pose a formidable challenge to the advancing fighters.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the offensive in a televised address early Sunday, calling it “a dawn of victories.” As he spoke, units from Iraq’s army, federal police and state-sanctioned militias approached Mosul from the south and west. By day’s end, they had captured a dozen tiny and mostly vacant villages south of Mosul, along with an electricity station, officials said.

The painless start belied a complicated and arduous battle ahead. Eastern Mosul was captured in January after months of punishing urban combat that left hundreds of civilians dead and elite Iraqi units battered by the stiff militant defenses, including roadside bombs, sniper fire and explosives-laden vehicles.

Iraqi troops will face all that and worse in western Mosul, across the bombed-out bridges on the Tigris River, fighting in a warren of streets too narrow for tanks against Islamist militants who have had months to prepare a deadly welcome. Each passing week of combat poses growing risks to hundreds of thousands of civilians still in the city, facing shortages of food, water, electricity and medicine and all but sequestered in their homes until Iraqi troops arrive.

“Families in western Mosul tell us escape is not an option – if they try to flee, they risk summary execution by ISIS fighters or a gauntlet of sniper fire and land mines,” Maurizio Crivallero, the Iraq country director for Save the Children, the Britain-based charity, said in a statement last week, using an acronym for the Islamic State.

An estimated 350,000 children remain trapped in the city, he said. “The impact of artillery and other explosive weaponry in those narrow, densely-populated streets is likely to be more deadly and indiscriminate than anything we have seen in the conflict so far,” he said.

U.S. troops involved in the air campaign said Sunday that there is broad recognition that it will be harder to carry out airstrikes in the western part of the city, citing the way remaining fighters have entrenched themselves as well as the closely settled nature of neighborhoods.

“It’s going to be a full-on cat-and-mouse fight in western Mosul,” said Air Force Lt. Col. August Pfluger, a squadron commander and F-22 Raptor pilot. “We are literally fighting city block by city block, and putting ordnance where the Iraqi ground forces want them.”

The offensive aims to reverse the Islamic State’s stunning advance into cities and towns across Iraq in the summer of 2014, a humiliating defeat for Nouri al-Maliki, Abadi’s predecessor as premier, and a setback that raised concerns about the morale and capabilities of Iraq’s military.

The latest advance on Mosul also comes at a time of rising tension between the Iraqi government and the United States over the White House decision to halt immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, including Iraq.

The Trump administration’s escalating condemnations of Iran, a dominant power in Iraq and a sponsor of Shiite militias fighting alongside Iraqi government units, has also threatened to complicate the efforts against the Islamic State.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, speaking Sunday in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, said that U.S. forces would continue “with the accelerated effort to destroy ISIS.”

Before the military push Sunday, thousands of leaflets were dropped over western Mosul, announcing the impending offensive and asking residents to “receive your brothers in the armed forces and cooperate with them.”

In the past few days, the United States has also stepped up its air sorties over Mosul, to about 30 to 50 a day from about 12 to 20, said Col. Kevin M. Eastland, vice commander of the Air Force’s 380th Air Expeditionary Wing. The unit has gone from using two of the six F-22s it has in the Middle East per day to four – a pace commanders do not consider sustainable for long periods because of maintenance requirements.

An F-22 pilot who asked that his name not be published because of security concerns, said some of his recent airstrikes hit a police station used by the Islamic State in Mosul and a command-and-control center. He and his colleagues had been in somewhat of a “lull,” in which they would often return to base hours later with some of their bombs, he said, but had received a list a few days ago that included about 110 “deliberate” targets that were planned for weeks by U.S. military and intelligence officials.

On the ground, the first military objectives include an Islamic State-controlled village and Mosul’s airport, both in the south of the city, Iraqi commanders said. On Sunday, in a reminder of the Islamic State’s continued ability to strike behind Iraqi lines, at least two suicide bombers carried out attacks in eastern Mosul, killing at least one person, officials said.

Fahim reported from Istanbul and Lamothe from Abu Dhabi.
Thousands of Iraqis flee western Mosul as the battle between Iraqi and allied forces and ISIL militants escalates in the densely populated Old City.