MOSUL, Iraq -- The Iraqi army said Sunday that troops have driven Islamic State militants out of the town of Nimrud, south of Mosul, near the site of famed ancient Assyrian ruins that were reportedly destroyed by the extremists.

Iraq's special forces meanwhile battled militants in the city of Mosul itself, where they struggled to advance against waves of suicide car bombs.

Troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city and the biggest urban area under IS control, as part of an offensive launched last month. The special forces have advanced the furthest so far, and hold a handful of districts on the city's eastern edge.

The commander of the Mosul operation said troops took Nimrud, some 19 miles to the south, after heavy fighting. It was unclear if they had liberated the nearby 13th-century B.C. archaeological site.

"The 9th division of the Iraqi army has liberated the town of Nimrud completely and raised the Iraqi flag over its buildings after the enemy suffered heavy casualties," Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Raheed Yar Allah said in a statement.

The late 1980s discovery of treasures in Nimrud's royal tombs was one of the 20th century's most significant archaeological finds. The government said militants, who captured the site in June 2014, destroyed it the following year using heavy military vehicles.

In Mosul itself, the special forces say they have cleared the Qadisiya and Zahra neighborhoods, and are planning to advance further in the coming hours. Over the past week they have inched forward slowly, trying to avoid casualties among their troops and civilians as suicide bombers in armor-plated vehicles rush forward from hiding spots among densely populated areas.

"The only weapons they have left are car bombs and explosives," said Iraqi special forces Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi as he radioed with commanders in the field. "There are so many civilian cars and any one of them could be a bomb," he said.

Troops were building berms and road blocks to prevent car bombs from breaching the front lines. Since last week's quick advance into Mosul proper, they have struggled to hold territory under heavy IS counterattacks.

Several suicide car bombers attacked the advancing special forces on Saturday, wounding around a dozen troops, three civilians, and killing a child, officers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to brief reporters.

The Iraqi armed forces do not release official casualty figures, but field medics have noted dozens of killed and wounded since the operation to liberate the city began on Oct. 17.

Meanwhile, a leading U.S.-based rights group released a report alleging that security forces of Iraq's regional Kurdish government had routinely destroyed Arab homes and even some whole villages in areas retaken from the Islamic State group over the past two years.

The Human Rights Watch report said that between September 2014 and May 2016, Kurdish forces advancing against IS destroyed Arab homes in disputed areas of Kirkuk and Ninevah provinces, while Kurdish homes were left intact. It says the demolitions took place in disputed areas in northern Iraq which the Kurds want to incorporate into their autonomous region over the objections of the central government.

Sunni Arab politicians have previously accused the Kurds of seeking to recast the demographics of mixed areas in northern Iraq. The struggle is particularly intense in the oil-rich Kirkuk region.

"In village after village in Kirkuk and Ninevah, KRG security forces destroyed Arab homes - but not those belonging to Kurds - for no legitimate military purpose," said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "KRG leaders' political goals don't justify demolishing homes illegally."

All sides fighting in the battle for Mosul have been accused of human rights abuses, with the worst allegations focusing on IS.

Kurdish forces have been accused of destroying Arab homes before, with a report last year by Amnesty International alleging that the peshmerga carried out the attacks in retaliation for what they said was the Arab communities' support for IS.

Kurdish authorities say they abide by human rights laws and deny having any strategy to destroy homes. But they say some villages in which the population fought alongside IS have suffered extensive destruction because of the ferocity of the battles.

Kurdish officials could not be immediately reached for comment on the fresh allegations.

 

 Rohan reported from Baghdad, Associated Press writer Sinan Salaheddin contributed from Baghdad.</s>Iraq says city close to archaeological site bulldozed by Islamic State militants two years ago has been liberated

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Iraqi military says its forces have retaken Nimrud, the site of an ancient Assyrian city overrun by Islamic State militants two years ago.



The commander of the Mosul operation, Lt Gen Abdul-Amir Raheed Yar Allah, said troops retook the town after heavy fighting and released a statement saying that “the 9th division of the Iraqi army has liberated the town of Nimrud completely and raised the Iraqi flag over its buildings after the enemy suffered heavy casualties”.

Nimrud lies less than a mile west of the ruins of the 3,000-year-old city. It was not immediately clear if Iraqi forces had retaken the archaeological site.



The soldiers also captured the village of Numaniya, on the edge of the city that was once the capital of an Assyrian empire stretching from Egypt to parts of modern-day Iran and Turkey.



Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State’s campaign to destroy symbols the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous, says the Iraqi government. Activists, officials and historians condemned Isis at the time for the destruction of the ancient Assyrian archaeological site, while Unesco described the act as a war crime.

Isis video shows destruction of ancient Assyrian city in Iraq Read more

Video footage released by Isis, purportedly from Nimrud, also showed its fighters destroying relics with electric drills and explosives.

Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, about 20 miles south of Mosul, where Iraqi soldiers and special forces are battling Islamic State for control of the largest city under the jihadis’ control in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

Nimrud was first excavated in the 1840s by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, who unearthed the winged bull gatekeeper statues later sent to the British Museum. The site also contains the palace of Ashurnasirpal, the king of Assyria.

Many of the site’s relics are in the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and other reliefs, wall paintings, clay tablets and ivory furniture recovered in the 1950s and 60s are in Iraq’s national museum in Baghdad.

Speaking to the Guardian last year following the destruction of the ancient site, historian Tom Holland said the act was “a crime against Assyria, against Iraq, and against humanity. Destroy the past, and you control the future. The Nazis knew this, and the Khmer Rouge – and the Islamic State clearly understand it too.”



David Vergili, a member of the European Syriac Union, said Isis had done “tremendous damage to the social fabric of the Middle East”.

He added: “Preserving cultural and historical heritage in Iraq and elsewhere should be a concern for the whole civilised world as the birthplace and epicentre of our civilisation.”</s>MOSUL, Iraq — Iraqi troops entered a town south of Mosul on Sunday where Islamic State militants destroyed artefacts at a nearby ancient Assyrian archaeological site, while special forces fended off suicide bombers during a cautious advance into the northern city.

The push into Nimrud was the most significant gain in several days for government forces, potentially opening up the area for teams to assess the damage done to the famed ruins just outside the town.

Troops are converging from several fronts on Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city and the biggest urban area under IS control, as part of an offensive launched last month.

The special forces have advanced the farthest so far, and hold a handful of districts on the city’s eastern edge, but their progress has slowed in the face of fierce resistance in dense urban neighborhoods full of civilians.

The operation’s commander said troops took Nimrud, some 19 miles (30 kilometers) south of Mosul, after heavy fighting. It was unclear if they had liberated the nearby 13th-century B.C. archaeological site, which IS destroyed with explosives according to videos they released.

“The 9th division of the Iraqi army has liberated the town of Nimrud completely and raised the Iraqi flag over its buildings after the enemy suffered heavy casualties,” Lt. Gen. Abdul-Amir Raheed Yar Allah said in a statement.

The late 1980s discovery of treasures in Nimrud’s royal tombs was one of the 20th century’s most significant archaeological finds. The government said militants, who captured the site in June 2014, destroyed it the following year using heavy military vehicles.

Video footage released by the jihadis at the time showed bearded men hammering, bulldozing and ultimately blowing up parts of the ancient Iraqi treasure, ripping down huge alabaster reliefs depicting Assyrian kings and deities. They claim the artefacts promote idolatry that violates their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.

Col. John Dorrian, a spokesman for the U.S.-led forces operating the air campaign assisting the operation against IS, said few airstrikes were used near Nimrud, and the advancing Iraqi troops had moved in carefully.

“It’s an important gain,” he said, but warned that IS often leaves behind some combatants. “As Iraqi forces get closer to Mosul, everything becomes more difficult as they like to leave behind a few fighters to spoil the advance.”

In Mosul itself, the special forces said they have cleared the Qadisiya and Zahra neighborhoods, and are planning to advance farther in the coming hours. Over the past week they have inched forward slowly, trying to avoid casualties among their troops and civilians as suicide bombers in armor-plated vehicles charge at them from hideouts in densely populated areas.

“The only weapons they have left are car bombs and explosives,” said Iraqi special forces Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi as he radioed with commanders in the field. “There are so many civilian cars and any one of them could be a bomb,” he said.

Troops were building berms and road blocks to prevent car bombs from breaching the front lines. Since last week’s quick advance into Mosul proper, they have struggled to hold territory under heavy IS counterattacks.

Several suicide car bombers attacked the advancing special forces on Saturday, wounding around a dozen troops, three civilians, and killing a child, officers said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to brief reporters.

The Iraqi armed forces do not release official casualty figures, but field medics have noted dozens of killed and wounded since the operation to liberate the city began on Oct. 17.

Civilians are paying a heavy toll in the battle for Mosul, with nearly 50,000 forced from their homes, most living in displaced persons camps. The Norwegian Refugee Council said Sunday that conditions were worsening for non-combatants, especially over the past week.

“Civilians have told us of horrific stories from inside Mosul,” said Wolfgang Gressmann, the group’s Iraq director. “They have given terrifying accounts of IS moving them from neighborhood to neighborhood, and from house to house, in tactics identical with being used as human shields.”

Meanwhile, a leading U.S.-based rights group released a report alleging that security forces of Iraq’s regional Kurdish government had routinely destroyed Arab homes and even some whole villages in areas retaken from the Islamic State group over the past two years.

The Human Rights Watch report said that between September 2014 and May 2016, Kurdish forces advancing against IS destroyed Arab homes in disputed areas of Kirkuk and Ninevah provinces, while Kurdish homes were left intact. It says the demolitions took place in disputed areas in northern Iraq which the Kurds want to incorporate into their autonomous region over the objections of the central government.

Sunni Arab politicians have previously accused the Kurds of seeking to recast the demographics of mixed areas in northern Iraq. The struggle is particularly intense in the oil-rich Kirkuk region.

“In village after village in Kirkuk and Ninevah, (Kurdish Regional Government) security forces destroyed Arab homes — but not those belonging to Kurds — for no legitimate military purpose,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “KRG leaders’ political goals don’t justify demolishing homes illegally.”

All sides fighting in the battle for Mosul have been accused of human rights abuses, with the worst allegations attributed to IS.

Kurdish forces have been accused of destroying Arab homes before, with a report last year by Amnesty International alleging that the peshmerga carried out the attacks in retaliation for what they said was the Arab communities’ support for IS.

Kurdish authorities say they abide by human rights laws and deny having any strategy to destroy homes. But they say some villages in which the population fought alongside IS have suffered extensive destruction because of the ferocity of the battles.

“There was a large presence of IEDs placed in these areas,” said Kurdish official Dindar Zebari, referring to Sunday’s report. “I have to say this was a huge cause of the destruction following the liberation process.”

Also Sunday, a wave of attacks in and around Baghdad killed at least 23 people and wounded 70 others, inflaming already combustive sectarian tensions in the country.

Police and health officials said many of the attacks struck Shiites on their way to an annual pilgrimage, with the deadliest bombing taking place in Baghdad’s northern Shaab neighborhood. There, an explosives-laden car parked near a checkpoint killed a policeman and two civilians, and wounded 12 others.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.

The capital has seen near-daily bombings since the Mosul operation began, but no large-scale attacks. Militants frequently target security forces and the Shiite majority as part of its campaign to destabilize the country.</s>Displaced Iraqi boys cry after their father was killed by a mortar launched by Daesh militants at Samah neighbourhood during a fight between the militants and the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Service in Mosul, Iraq, on Sunday (Reuters photo)

MOSUL, Iraq — Iraqi forces said on Sunday they had recaptured the site of an ancient Assyrian city blown up by the Daesh terror group, as they battled the extremists south of Mosul.

The troops pushed towards Nimrud last week as they pressed an offensive begun on October 17 to recapture Iraq's second city, which the militants seized along with swathes of Iraq and Syria in mid-2014.

A Kurdish-Arab alliance is pursuing a twin offensive against the other major city still under Daesh control, Raqqa in Syria, and a US-led coalition is backing both assaults with air strikes.

"The villages of Al Nomaniyah and Al Nimrud and the ruins of Nimrud were recaptured," Staff Brigadier General Saad Ibrahim of the 9th Armoured Division told AFP.

Iraq's Joint Operations Command had announced earlier in the day that the entire Nimrud area was retaken, but later said that this was incorrect.

The village of Nimrud and the archaeological site have, however, been recaptured, 

 the JOC said.

Nimrud was the one of the great centres of the ancient Middle East. Founded in the 13th century BC, it became the capital of the Assyrian empire, whose rulers built vast palaces and monuments that have drawn archaeologists for more than 150 years.

In April last year, Daesh posted a video on the Internet of its fighters smashing monuments before planting explosives around the site and blowing it up.

It was part of a campaign of destruction against heritage sites under extremist control that also took in Hatra in the desert south of Mosul and Palmyra in neighbouring Syria.

Daesh says the ancient monuments are idols that violate the teachings of its extreme form of religious interpretation, but it has still sold artefacts to fund its operations.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation welcomed the news of Nimrud’s recapture.

“We welcome the news that Nimrud, a UNESCO world heritage site, is back under the control of the Iraqi government,” said spokesman George Papagiannis.

“We look forward to coordinating with the relevant authorities in Baghdad on providing support for any assessments that need to be done of the site, once the area has been stabilised.”

The Iraqi offensive has seen federal forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters advance on Mosul from the east, south and north.

The elite Counter-Terrorism Services (CTS) force has pushed into the eastern outskirts of Mosul, with heavy fighting in recent days.

CTS Staff Lieutenant Colonel Muntadhar Salem told AFP on Sunday that its forces were looking to move into a new eastern neighbourhood.

“Our goal today is to clear out [Daesh] from the western part of Karkukli,” he said.

North of Karkukli in the neighbourhood of Arbajiyah, CTS forces were facing sniper fire as they moved street-to-street clearing houses.

On the edge of Mosul, dozens of civilians could be seen walking towards a gathering point from where they would be taken to a camp for the displaced. A dozen men swarmed around a barber shop for a shave.</s>Iraqi soldiers have captured Nimrud, the site of an ancient Assyrian city overrun by Islamic State militants two years ago, a military statement said on Sunday.

“Troops from the Ninth Armoured Division liberated Nimrud town completely and raised the Iraqi flag above its buildings,” the statement said. The town of Nimrud lies 1 km west of the ruins of the 3,000-year-old city.

The soldiers also captured the village of Numaniya, on the edge of the city which was once the capital of an Assyrian empire stretching from Egypt to parts of modern-day Iran and Turkey.

The Iraqi government says Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State’s campaign to destroy symbols which the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous.

Video footage released by Islamic State, purportedly from Nimrud, also showed its fighters destroying relics with electric drills and explosives.

Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, about 30km south of Mosul where Iraqi soldiers and special forces are battling Islamic State for control of the largest city under the jihadists’ control in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.</s>The Iraqi military said today that soldiers south of Mosul have recaptured the Nimrud area, home to the site of an ancient Assyrian city that was blown up by the Islamic State group.

“Units of the 9th Armoured Division completely liberate the Nimrud (area) and raise the Iraqi flag over the buildings,” Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) said in a statement quoting a top military officer.

The JOC did not specifically mention the Nimrud archaeological site, which is located a little over a kilometre west of the village that bears its name.

Iraqi forces seeking to drive IS from second city Mosul also retook another village southeast of the site of Nimrud, which was founded in the 13th century and was one of the great centres of the ancient Middle East.

The city became the capital of the Assyrian empire, whose rulers built vast palaces and monuments that have drawn archaeologists from around the world for more than 150 years.

In April last year, IS posted video on the internet of its fighters sledgehammering monuments before planting explosives around the site and blowing it up.

It was part of a campaign of destruction by the jihadists against heritage sites under their control that also took in ancient Nineveh on the outskirts of Mosul, Hatra in the desert to the south and Palmyra in neighbouring Syria.

IS casts its destruction of artefacts and historic sites as religiously mandated elimination of idols, but that has not stopped it from selling smaller items to fund its operations.

It is unclear what still remains of Nimrud’s ancient ruins.

Many of its monumental stone sculptures and reliefs were taken away for display in museums around the world but some of the more massive structures remained in place when the jihadists swept through in mid-2014.</s>(CNN) For centuries, the massive Assyrian city in Northern Iraq lay buried beneath the sands of time, forgotten by history.

Archeologists first began excavating Nimrud -- built nearly 3,000 years ago -- in the 1840s. In the decades that followed, they unearthed priceless treasures from the city, including palaces adorned with unique frescoes and giant sculptures, that offered a window into Iraq's glorious past.

Last year, ISIS blew up the ancient walled city.

The terror group released disturbing footage of the destruction. Militants with electric drills and sledgehammers smashed statues and tore holes in the walls. Bulldozers razed structures to the ground. The last frame of the video captures a massive explosion and a cloud of smoke and dust.

UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, described the deliberate destruction of Nimrud as a "war crime."

On Sunday, Iraqi forces liberated the village of Nimrud and the site of the ruins as part of the ongoing battle for Mosul, ISIS' last major stronghold in Iraq, according to Col. Mohammed Ibrahim, a spokesman for Iraq's Joint operations command.

Nimrud includes a town and a village adjacent to the ruins. While the village is now under control by Iraqi forces, clashes are still underway to retake the town, less than a mile west of the ruins, Col. Ibrahim told CNN. Nimrud is 20 miles (30 km) southeast of Mosul.

"The palaces of Sennacherib at Nineveh and Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud are vestiges of the political, cultural and artistic height of the Assyrian Empire," the WMF says on its website under the heading, "Why it Matters." The group had helped preserve the treasures at Nimrud following the 2003 Iraq war.

This is not the first time that ISIS has targeted cultural and ancient sites in Iraq and Syria. The terror group took over the ancient ruined city of Hatra in 2014, using it to store weapons and ammunitions. It has destroyed libraries, palaces and churches, and blown up shrines such as the tomb of Jonah , a holy site said to be the burial place of the prophet Jonah, and a key figure in Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

"ISIS continues to defy the will of the world and the feelings of humanity," Iraq's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities said in a statement last year, condemning the destruction in the Mosul museum.

"Letting these lost gangs go without punishment will encourage them to destroy humanity's civilization, the Mesopotamian civilization, inflicting irreversible priceless damages and losses."

Iraq's neighbor Syria is also a treasure trove of archaeological sites, many of which have been reduced to rubble during that country's ongoing civil war.

ISIS is part of a puritanical strain of Islam that considers all religious shrines -- Islamic, Christian, Jewish, etc. -- idolatrous.

It is not the only militant group bent on the destruction of the symbols of ancient life. In 2001, the Taliban blew up giant statues, the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan despite international pleas to spare the country's pre-Islamic relics.

The destruction has disturbed many scholars and historians.</s>"Troops from the Ninth Armoured Division liberated Nimrud town completely and raised the Iraqi flag above its buildings," the statement said. The town of Nimrud lies 1 km (less than 1 mile) west of the ruins of the 3,000-year-old city.

The soldiers also captured the village of Numaniya, on the edge of the city which was once the capital of an Assyrian empire stretching from Egypt to parts of modern-day Iran and Turkey.

The Iraqi government says Nimrud was bulldozed last year as part of Islamic State's campaign to destroy symbols which the Sunni Muslim zealots consider idolatrous.

Video footage released by Islamic State, purportedly from Nimrud, also showed its fighters destroying relics with electric drills and explosives.

Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, about 30 km (20 miles) south of Mosul where Iraqi soldiers and special forces are battling Islamic State for control of the largest city under the jihadists' control in Iraq and neighboring Syria.</s>Nimrud's palace and temples, once at the heart of an empire which stretched across the Middle East, were razed by the ultra-hardline zealots after they swept through northern Iraq in 2014, destroying historic sites they declared idolatrous.

Whether any treasures at Nimrud can be rescued will be hard to assess until archaeologists can get there. That will take time because of fears the militants have left bombs or even fighters concealed in tunnels among the ruins.

"We are stepping up drone surveillance now over Nimrud to make sure no imminent threat still exists," a colonel in the Ninth Armoured Division told Reuters.

He said troops were in control of the area, but had strict instructions to be "extremely cautious" and were staying out of Nimrud while remaining villages nearby were cleared. The drones overflying the area were unarmed.

"We want to make sure we don't inflict even the least damage to buildings in Nimrud already damaged by the evil Daesh (Islamic State)," he said.

Nimrud lies on the eastern bank of the Tigris river, 30 km (20 miles) south of Mosul where Iraqi soldiers are battling to crush Islamic State. Mosul is the largest city under the militants' control in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The Sunni Islamist group still controls the remains of the ancient city of Nineveh, in central Mosul. Khorsabad, another Assyrian site northeast of Mosul, is close to the frontline of the current conflict.

To the south, the 2,000-year-old desert city of Hatra, famed for its pillared temple blending Graeco-Roman and eastern styles, was also seized and damaged by the militants in 2014.

The UN cultural agency UNESCO has condemned the destruction at Nimrud as a war crime and an attack on the world's shared heritage, pointing to ancient Mesopotamia's role as a cradle of civilization where early urban centers flourished and cuneiform writing on clay was developed.

"Liberation of ancient Iraqi archaeological sites from the control of the forces of dark and evil is a victory not only for Iraqis but for all humanity," Iraq's deputy culture minister Qais Hussain Rasheed told Reuters after the army announced it had taken Nimrud.

In neighboring Syria, Islamic State was driven out of the city of Palmyra eight months ago, after dynamiting monuments including two temples and Palmyra's imposing triumphal arch.

Syria's antiquities chief said much of Palmyra could be restored, but video footage of the destruction carried out by the militants in Nimrud, and a government report issued last year, suggest the devastation in Iraq is extensive.

The report by Iraq's culture ministry said a carved wall panel was stolen from the northern palace at Nimrud in July 2014. Eight months later, far greater damage was inflicted.

The militants destroyed 10 colossal statues of winged bulls, located at the palace gates and at the temple of Ishtar - goddess of love, war, sex and power - and Nabu - god of literature and wisdom.

A month later in April 2015 "the gangs completely blew up the city and its ancient buildings" the report said.

Video released by Islamic State supporters, purporting to show them at work in Nimrud, included footage of the militants using bulldozers and electric drills to tear down murals and statues. They also rigged up barrels full of explosives which they appeared to detonate at the site.

As recently as in the last three months, according to satellite imagery, Islamic State appears to have bulldozed the ziggurat, or step tower, built by Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III in the 9th century BC.

Pictures released by the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) Cultural Heritages Initiative showed that between late August and early November the towering remains of the ziggurat had been steadily flattened.

What appeared to be scars from bulldozer shovels were visible, and ASOR said there were also signs of machinery tracks at the temple of Ishtar. A picture which ASOR dated Nov. 4 did, however, show contours of the palace and two temples still visible, suggesting they were not entirely erased.

"It's premature to talk about the extent of damage that has been caused by Daesh," a government archaeological source said.

"After the sites have been completely secured by the army, then we will send the archaeology police to cordon off the sites," the source added. "Then we will send our crews to take images and write a detailed report on the damage."

Nimrud was excavated by a series of archaeological missions since the 19th century including in the 1950s by British archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was accompanied by his wife, detective novelist Agatha Christie.

Her experiences in Iraq, and journeys from Britain to the Middle East, formed the background to several of her books, including Murder on the Orient Express, They Came to Baghdad, and Murder in Mesopotamia.</s>BAGHDAD — A suicide car bomber from the Islamic State group attacked Iraqi special forces in Mosul on Saturday, setting off heavy fighting in the northern city.

The early morning attack in the Qadisiya neighborhood, which the troops entered a day earlier, was followed by a barrage of gunfire, mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenades, Iraqi officers said.

Fighting was also underway in the adjoining Arbajiya neighborhood, the officers added, speaking on condition of anonymity because they aren't authorized to brief reporters.

The Iraqi armed forces do not release casualty figures, but field medics have noted dozens of killed and wounded since the operation to liberate Iraq's second largest city began on Oct. 17.

Iraqi special forces entered Mosul earlier this month, gaining a foothold on the city's eastern edges. But the advance has slowed as they push into more densely populated neighborhoods.

The urban landscape inside Mosul proper makes defense easier for the militants, eager to hold on to the last major Iraqi stronghold of their self-styled caliphate. Defeat in Mosul would be a major blow to their project, and they have said they are ready to fight to the death.

To the south of the city, militarized Iraqi police have come within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of Mosul's airport, which satellite images show has been heavily fortified.

The images, taken earlier this month by U.S.-based private intelligence firm Stratfor, show IS fighters have cleared terrain and leveled buildings around the airport and a nearby former military base on the west bank of the Tigris River. Rows of concrete barricades, earthen mounds and rubble are blocking other key routes into the city center.

In Baghdad, meanwhile, bombings killed at least nine people and wounded 32 others, according to police and medical officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

The deadliest of the attacks hit the Kifah neighborhood in the city center, ripping through an area full of auto repair shops, killing three and wounding 10.

The capital has seen near-daily bombings since the Mosul operation began, but no large-scale attacks. Militants frequently target security forces and the Shiite majority as part of its campaign to destabilize the country.
The ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, south of Mosul, is recaptured by the Iraqi Army after heavy fighting with ISIL militants.