Backed by air support, Iraqi and Kurdish ‘Peshmerga’ forces continue to make gains surrounding the city of Mosul, as part of a wider operation to recapture the city from the Islamic State. Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, is where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his Islamic Caliphate in 2014, after his alliance between ‘millenarian Islamists’ and veteran officers from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussein returned into Iraq from the mayhem of Syria’s war.
The battle to retake Mosul is described by military experts as the beginning of the end for the Islamic State, as a coalition of some 30,000-strong Iraqi regular forces, backed by the United States and Europeans, alongside Kurdish and Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias, are advancing on an estimated 8,000 jihadist militants of the extreme Muslim organization.