Thursday, June 15, 2017

The Battle for Mosul is almost over

(Iraq) ISIS shocked the world when they made huge inroads into Iraq from their base inside Syria. By Nov 2014, they were knocking on the doors of Baghdad.


But after suffering huge embarrassing losses, the Iraqis halted the march of ISIS and slowly took the fight back to them. 30 months later and the situation has been totally reversed from the map above, with only small pockets of ISIS actually remaining in country.


The map above from a month ago shows in black the last holdouts of the Islamic state inside Iraq. The big lump at the top of Iraq is Mosul and that picture has changed somewhat of late. The city is split into 2 halves separated by the Tigris river.


The eastern half of the city was completely recaptured by the 23 January 2017, and after a brief halt in which to catch their breath, they resumed their offensive and started the advance to clear ISIS from the Western half at the beginning of February. As the last redoubt of the Islamic state inside Iraq, the fighting has been tough (remember, these are idiots who are happy to die). Anyway, as of yesterday, ISIS have been completely encircled and hold onto 2 very small districts of the old city.


Looks like Mosul will be free of ISIS by the end of Ramadan.