Kurdish forces fire into IS-held Mosul

Arbil, Iraq: Kurdish forces have fired rockets into Mosul for the first time since IS militants overran the northern Iraqi city last summer, Kurdish military sources said on Saturday.

A Kurdish officer said 20 Grad missiles had been launched into Mosul on Friday after receiving information that IS militants were gathering to meet near the city's Zuhour neighborhood.

"We hit their positions," said Captain Shivan Ahmed, who belongs to the unit that fired the rockets from around 20 kilometres (12 miles) north of Mosul.

Kurdish officials said the strikes had hit their intended target, but two residents of Mosul contacted by Reuters said three civilians were killed in the attack. It was not possible to independently verify the accounts.

Following the attack, IS militants published images of a girl lying in a hospital bed, who they said had been wounded by fire from the Kurdish peshmerga fighters.

US-led airstrikes regularly target areas outside of Mosul, but rarely strike inside the city due to concerns about civilian casualties.

A statement attributed to an unnamed senior Kurdish military source and posted on the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party's official website said the shelling had "struck great fear into the hearts of the terrorists".

Peshmerga forces this week launched a ground offensive northwest of Mosul backed by coalition airstrikes, reclaiming territory and cutting the extremist group's main supply line from the city to the west.

Twenty-one senior IS militants were killed during the operation, the Kurdistan Region's Security Council said in a statement on Friday.

It said the slain IS leaders included the head of Nineveh province's administrative institutions and a close commander of its special forces, the statement said. There was no way to independently verify the claims.

Meanwhile, an AFP report from Washington quoted Pentagon as saying on Friday that IS extremists have lost only a tiny fraction of captured territory in Iraq after five months of US-led air strikes.

Kurdish peshmerga forces and Iraqi government troops have retaken 700 square kilometers (270 square miles) of ground mostly in northern Iraq, but the IS group still holds 55,000 square kilometers, spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby told reporters. 

That amounts to roughly one percent of IS-held territory changing hands since the US launched air raids in Iraq on August 8.

Kirby acknowledged that not much ground had been gained back so far but said that the air strikes had halted the momentum of the extremists and bought time for the training of Baghdad government forces. "I think we all recognize that it's a small percentage of the total right now. But we're only six, seven months into this thing, too," he said.

The US military has made clear the campaign against IS "is going to take time, to uproot these guys and to really get at them," he said.

The Pentagon provided the figures after announcing recently that Iraqi and Kurdish troops had regained 700 square kilometers, without explaining what percentage that represented of all territory held by the IS militants.

By comparison, the Iraqi government held about 77,000 square kilometers and the Kurdish forces controlled roughly 56,000 square kilometers, he said. Those numbers did not represent the entire territory of Iraq, but only populated, "relevant" areas, according to Kirby.

US commanders have said that the Iraqi army needed to be reorganised and armed before staging a major counter-offensive to roll back the IS from large swathes of territory it seized last year.

The officer overseeing the US-led campaign against the IS group, General Lloyd Austin, head of Central Command, told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that Iraqi forces would be ready to launch a counter-offensive to recapture the northern city of Mosul by the summer. 

Since August 8, there have been nearly 2,000 air strikes in the fight against IS in Iraq and Syria, with American warplanes carrying out more than 1,600 of those raids, defence officials said.

Yay for the Kurds actually firing into Mosul, even if they did it with a fairly inaccurate and indiscriminate weapon.

Grad is a multiple rocket launcher system capable of firing 40 rockets at a time.  The rockets are a form of artillery where a general area is targeted and the missiles strike a larger piece of real estate at the same time thereby hoping to improve the odds of successful attack over single round traditional artillery.

Given that ISIS has made a point of inserting itself among civilian populations and having had around 6 months to build their defenses fair or unfair, it would be interesting to learn what the actual effect of the salvo was.