Kirkuk // Iraq has deployed thousands of soldiers to a northern base as the army prepares to recapture the city of Mosul from ISIL, officials said on Monday.
ISIL seized Mosul in June 2014 and has held Iraq’s second city largely unopposed for more than 18 months as the country’s security forces battled the extremists in other areas.
“Units from the Iraqi army have begun arriving to a military base near the Makhmur district to start launching initial military operations toward Mosul,” a staff brigadier general said on condition of anonymity.
Makhmur lies 70 kilometres south-east of Mosul.
“There are three brigades located in that base now,” said the officer, who is part of the security command tasked with retaking Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital.
He said 4,500 soldiers will eventually be deployed there.
Iraqi forces recaptured Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, west of Baghdad, in December in a major blow to the militants.
But Mosul is expected to be the most difficult battle of Iraq’s war against ISIL due to its size, the presence of large numbers of civilians in the city, and the long period the extremists have had to prepare defences.
It is the largest city held by ISIL, and along with Raqqa in Syria is one of the two main hubs for their operations.
The initial aim is to sever ISIL’s supply lines between Mosul and areas farther south including Hawijah in Kirkuk province and areas near Baiji in Salaheddin, the army officer said.
Iraqi forces have worked slowly and deliberately to isolate other ISIL-held cities such as Tikrit and Ramadi before launching assaults to retake them, and cutting off Mosul will likely take longer than either.
The commander of the US-led operation against ISIL, Lt Gen Sean MacFarland, has said that Iraqi generals do not think they will be able to recapture Mosul until the end of 2016 or early 2017 at the earliest.
A Kurdish official said that most of the soldiers deployed to Makhmur, which is located within territory controlled by Iraqi Kurdistan, are ethnic Kurds from the Iraqi army.
“These forces came with the approval of the presidency and government of the Kurdistan region of Iraq,” said Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman from the ministry responsible for the autonomous region’s peshmerga forces.
The base will be for both soldiers and aircraft, Mr Hekmat said.
Shakhwan Abdullah, a Kurdish lawmaker, confirmed that Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan had coordinated on the deployment.
“Establishing this base cost around US$10 million (Dh36.7m),” said Mr Abdullah, adding that the base would be turned over to Kurdish peshmerga forces after the recapture of Mosul.
Defence minister Khaled Al Obeidi visited the Makhmur base on Saturday, ordering that all measures be taken to speed up the completion of the site.
Multiple Iraqi divisions collapsed during the early days of ISIL’s 2014 offensive, abandoning thousands of vehicles as well as weapons and other equipment to the extremists.
ISIL ultimately overran a third of the country, but Iraqi forces have since regained significant areas from them, with the help of US-led air strikes and training.
On Monday, Canada announced that its bombing missions in Iraq and Syria will end by February 22.
Prime minister Justin Trudeau said his country would pull out six jets that have been bombing ISIL targets in Iraq and Syria, ending Canada’s controversial combat role in the effort against ISIL.
However, two surveillance planes will remain in the region as well as refueling aircraft, and triple the number of soldiers training Kurdish troops in northern Iraq to about 200, from about 70 currently, the government said.
* Agence France-Presse and Reuters