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AFP
Mosul, Iraq
Iraqi forces announced on Tuesday they had retaken yet another neighbourhood of western Mosul, tightening the noose around jihadists holed up in the Old City.
Forces from the elite Counter-Terrorism Service"liberated the Northern Industrial Area on the western side," the Joint Operations Command (JOC) coordinating the war against the Islamic State group in Iraq said.
The JOC said in its statement that the forces"raised the Iraqi flag after inflicting losses to the enemy."
The fresh gain is part of a new push which Iraqi forces launched last week in northwestern Mosul and has already wrested back several neighbourhoods from the jihadists.
On Monday, Iraqi forces retook full control of Al-Haramat, a large neighbourhood on the edge of the city.
The latest operations make it harder than ever to flee for the few hundred IS fighters estimated to remain in Mosul.
The jihadists who have been defending their last major bastion in the country for more than six months have offered limited resistance in recent days, apparently regrouping in the Old City for a last stand.
IS only controls a handful of neighbourhoods around the Old City, where at least 250,000 civilians are still trapped and living in dire conditions, according to aid officials and rights groups.
Fly-blown corpses of Islamic State militants (IS) littered the streets of a district in Mosul on Tuesday as US-backed Iraqi forces chipped away at the last remaining handful of districts under the jihadists' control.
Seven months into the campaign to recapture Iraq's second largest city, government forces say it is now in its final phase after opening a new front in the northwest of Mosul last week and gaining ground in several districts there. Trapped in a shrinking area with no way out, the ultra hardline Sunni militants are hitting back with a barrage of suicide car bombs and snipers hidden among hundreds of thousands of civilians they are effectively holding hostage.
A reporter in the Harmat district, which has been partially retaken by the Interior Ministry's elite Emergency Response Division, said there was heavy fighting there on Tuesday.
Jets flying overhead conducted air strikes and helicopters strafed IS positions while several car bombs exploded in the distance. Heavy sniper and mortar fire could be heard.
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10/05/2017
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