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| Iraq |
| Iraqi forces ready by ‘early October’ for Mosul assault |
| 2016-09-22 |
| [ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] Iraqi security forces will be ready by next month for an assault on the Islamic State ...formerly ISIS or ISIL, depending on your preference. Before that al-Qaeda in Iraq, as shaped by Abu Musab Zarqawi. They're very devout, committing every atrocity they can find in the Koran and inventing a few more. They fling Allaharound with every other sentence, but to hear the pols talk they're not reallyMoslems.... stronghold of djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... , the top general in the US military said Wednesday. "We assess today that the Iraqis will have in early October all the forces marshaled, trained, fielded, equipped that are necessary for operations in Mosul," General Joe Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a military event in Washington. "Timing of that operation now is really just a function of a political decision by Prime Minister (Haider al-)Abadi." Iraqi forces have been moving northwards from Baghdad for almost two years, gradually retaking areas over which ISIS declared its "caliphate" in June 2014. Kurdish peshmerga forces to the north of Mosul will also join the assault. The United States is leading an international air campaign that has been pounding ISIS targets across Iraq and Syria. Though the Pentagon does not plan on directly sending American troops into combat, it has thousands of soldiers in Iraq who are training and arming Iraqi partners. "We will be in a position to provide whatever support, whatever reinforcement, those forces need in order to be successful," Dunford said. ISIS seized Mosul, Iraq’s cosmopolitan and religiously mixed second city, in a lightning offensive through the north and west of the country. Mosul had an estimated population of around two million before ISIS took it over. Accurate numbers for the population remaining in the city are hard to come by but the United Nations ...a formerly good idea gone bad... and other officials have said up to one million civilians may still be living under ISIS rule in the Mosul area. The Pentagon estimates 3,000 to 4,500 IS fighters are in Mosul. |
| Posted by:Fred |