Iraqi army announces fresh gains in battle for Mosul

By Ibrahim Saleh and Serhad Shakir

NINEVEH, Iraq (AA) - Iraqi forces have made fresh gains against the Daesh terrorist group in several parts of Mosul, Iraqi army officials announced Tuesday.

"Forces from Iraq’s anti-terrorism agency liberated Mosul’s eastern Souq al-Aghnam and Bab al-Shams districts today," Lieutenant-General Abdul Amir Yarallah, commander of the army’s Nineveh Operations Command, said in a press statement.

"The terrorists sustained severe human and material losses in the fighting," he added.

In a subsequent statement broadcast the same day on state television, Yarallah announced that Iraqi forces had also captured a strategic military facility north of the city.

According to the army commander, anti-terrorism forces have recaptured eastern Mosul’s Al-Mohandessin, Al-Numaniya and Al-Atshana areas.

Yarallah went on to announce the recapture of the Al-Kindi military/industrial facility, along with the 2nd Army Division’s former HQ, both of which are located in northern Mosul.

Kamal al-Din Yassin al-Karkhi, for his part, a commander of the army’s anti-terrorism agency, told Anadolu Agency that Iraqi forces were now in control of almost all of Mosul’s eastern outskirts.

According to Colonel Ahmed al-Jubouri of the Nineveh Operations Command, the Al-Kindi facility had been used by the Saddam Hussein regime before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Last Sunday, the Iraqi army announced the "liberation" of some 80 residential districts of northern Mosul.

Last October, the Iraqi army -- backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes and local allies on the ground -- began a wide-ranging campaign to retake the city, which was overrun by the terrorist group in 2014.