Islamic State strikes back with female suicide bombers as Iraqi forces advance in Mosul

Reporting from MOSUL, Iraq —  The Islamic State group is striking back as Iraqi forces are on the cusp of full victory in Mosul, sending female suicide bombers to target soldiers as the battle for the country’s second-largest city nears its end. At least 15 people were killed in the latest assaults across Iraq, officials said Monday.

The attacks underscore the intense violence still plaguing the battered nation and the perils that will remain even after Islamic State militants are pushed out of Mosul.

On Monday morning in Mosul’s Old City neighborhood — the scene of Islamic State’s last stand as soldiers are fast closing in on the last remaining pocket of militants — two female suicide bombers, hiding among a group of fleeing civilians, targeted Iraqi troops, killing one soldier and wounding several others.

And at a camp for displaced people in Iraq’s western Anbar province, a suicide bomber dressed in a woman’s all-covering robe killed 14 on Sunday evening, a provincial official said.

After days of fierce battles, the militant-held territory in Mosul is rapidly shrinking, with Islamic State now controlling just over 1 square kilometer in all, or about 0.40 square miles.

Using women as suicide bombers is apparently the latest tactic by the militants, Sgt. Ali Abdullah Hussein told the Associated Press as he returned from the front line, his troops carrying the body of their slain comrade wrapped in a blanket.

“They appeared from the basement [of a building] and they blew themselves up,” Hussein said of the two female bombers.

The attack happened in the area of the destroyed Nuri Mosque, which was the focus of the Iraqi forces’ push last week.

Over the last three days, Hussein said, at least four such attacks have targeted Iraqi forces as hundreds of Mosul’s civilians fled the battles in the Old City’s congested streets.

After the explosion on Monday, another group of civilians appeared on the main road, prompting the Iraqi soldiers to immediately draw their weapons. They then yelled to the group of mostly women and children to back away and take another route out.

Islamic State overran Mosul in a matter of days more than three years ago. The U.S.-backed offensive to retake the city was launched last October and has lasted nearly nine months, although Iraqi political and military officials had vowed that victory would be declared by the end of 2016.

Iraqi forces launched the operation to retake the Old City in mid-June and after a dawn push last Thursday, they retook the area around the Nuri Mosque, which the militants had blown up just a few days earlier.

The 12th century mosque is hugely symbolic — it was from a pulpit of that mosque that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi proclaimed the Islamic State caliphate in July 2014.

After the Iraqi forces retook the Nuri Mosque, Prime Minister Haider Abadi declared an end to Islamic State’s so-called caliphate and pledged victory was “near.”

The suicide bombing in Anbar took place at dusk on Sunday, as authorities were accommodating families that had fled from the Islamic State-held town of Qaim, in western Iraq, according to Councilman Taha Abdul-Ghani.

Abdul-Ghani said a police colonel was among the 14 dead, and at least 20 were wounded in the explosion.

The death toll could have been higher, Abdul-Ghani said, but the colonel had become suspicious about the person in the long robe and walked up to the attacker, embracing him — presumably to reduce the number of casualties — as he detonated his explosives.

Iraqi forces have pushed Islamic State out of most of Anbar, and though there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the camp attack, it had all the hallmarks of Islamic State, which has in the past months staged large-scale attacks elsewhere in Iraq to distract from its losses in Mosul.

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