Two roadside bombs struck a convoy carrying Iraqi families fleeing an Islamic State-controlled town in the north of the country late on Friday, killing 18 people, a police officer said.
The bombs targeted a truck carrying people from Hawija, about 120 km south of the Islamic State group’s stronghold in Mosul, as they were being taken to the town of Al Alam, next to the Tigris river.
Seventeen of the dead were from the displaced families, regional police Colonel Nemaa al-Jabouri said. One policeman in an accompanying patrol car was also killed.
Pictures published on social media by a group linked to Iraq’s defence ministry showed several blackened corpses next to the twisted metal remains of the truck.
Meanwhile, Iraqi special forces threw themselves back into battle on Saturday after a first foray into Mosul was blunted by stiffer than expected resistance from jihadists defending the birthplace of their “caliphate”.
While the elite Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS) fought the Islamic State group in the streets of Mosul, the army and federal police attacked one of the last sizeable towns on the more distant southern front.
The mass exodus feared by aid groups of some of the million-plus civilians still trapped in Mosul has yet to materialise, but the number of people displaced by the battle has grown sharply in recent days.
“Our forces are now engaged in fierce fighting inside the neighbourhoods of east Mosul,” CTS spokesman Sabah al-Noman said, adding that the “fighting is house to house”.
In Bartalla, a town to the east that Iraqi forces have used as a base since retaking it in the early days of the nearly three-week-old offensive, ambulances returning from the front with wounded CTS fighters rushed by on a regular basis.
CTS forces made their first real push into the streets of Mosul on Friday but were met by a deluge of bombs and gunfire, and eventually forced into a partial pullback after a few hours.
“We weren’t expecting such resistance. They had blocked all the roads,” said one officer. “There are large numbers of jihadists... It was preferable to pull back and devise a new plan.” The hitch in the CTS advance appeared to contradict reports that IS had moved its resources away from the east of Mosul to the west bank of the River Tigris.
The jihadist group had looked increasingly pragmatic when vastly outnumbered and outgunned in recent months, sometimes giving up emblematic bastions almost without a fight.
But some of the 3,000 to 5,000 jihadists estimated to be inside the city may have been galvanised by a rare message from their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Thursday.
The jihadist supremo released an audio recording for the first time in almost a year, urging his fighters not to retreat.
Federal forces on the southern front attacked Hamam al-Alil, one of the main towns between their staging base in Qayyarah and Mosul.
“Army and federal police forces are attacking the Hamam al-Alil (area) from three sides with the support of army aviation,” Staff Lieutenant General Abdulamir Yarallah said in a statement released by Joint Operations Command.
Forces working their way up the Tigris Valley have had more distance to cover than those on other fronts since Iraq launched the operation to retake Mosul on October 17.
