Hundreds of ISIS fighters are fleeing Mosul in Iraq and crossing into neighboring Syria as coalition forces close in on the city, a powerful tribal leader in the region, Sheikh Abdullah Alyawer, said yesterday.
Alyawer, a tribal leader in the town of Rabia, on Iraq’s border with Syria, said dozens of ISIS militants and their families fled the city each day, and crossing into Syria at Ba’aaj, an ISIS-controlled crossing point south of Sinjar.
“The route was entirely along corridors under ISIS control, he said. Fleeing civilians with no affiliation to ISIS usually ended up in the Syrian town of al Houl, which is under Kurdish control,” Alyawer said.
Coalition forces celebrated better-than-expected territorial gains over the weekend and as artillery fire pummeled ISIS positions in the encircled town of 33Bashiqa early yesterday as the push for Mosul continued relentlessly.
According to Iraqi Joint Operations command center, 78 towns and villages have been liberated so far as the push to retake the city enters its second week.
The center said 772 ISIS fighters had been killed and 23 detained, 127 vehicle-borne explosive devices destroyed, two bomb-making factories discovered and nearly 400 improvised-explosive devices remotely detonated so far.
The offensive is remarkable for both its speed and also the level of cooperation that this disparate group is showing in the face of its common enemy, an extraordinary union of factions that have long stood on opposing sides in Iraq’s history, with Kurdish forces, Christians and Shia Muslims fighting alongside the majority Sunni Arabs.
The thousands of ground troops were supported from above with a concentrated program of airstrikes aimed at weakening ISIS’ defenses, the highest weekly number since the campaign against the terror group began, according to Brett McGurk, Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS.
“One week into #Mosul operation, all objectives met thus far, and more coalition airstrikes than any other 7-day period of war against #ISIS,” McGurk wrote on Twitter, using another name for ISIS.
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