(IraqiNews.com) Mosul – Iraqi security forces liberated on Tuesday the state-run Iraq Media Network’s office in the city of Mosul from the self-proclaimed Islamic State extremist group, state TV has announced in breaking news.

“Anti-terrorism forces have entered the city’s first districts, liberated the Iraq Media Network’s building in the east side of Mosul, capital of Nineveh Governorate, and raised the Iraqi flag above,” the report said.

An operation by Iraqi security forces, codenamed “We Are Coming Nineveh”, has entered its 16th day to liberate the governorate, IS’s last stronghold in the country. The campaign reached the east side on Monday, with IS abolishing reference to Mosul as the capital of its proclaimed “Caliphate” and evacuating its camps and secret prisons in the Ghazlani, besides taking out its wounded fighters from the city’s hospitals to an unknown destination.

In a related context, Abdel Karim al-Kilani, media advisor to the Nineveh governorate council, said Islamic State militants are holding 100 former security officers captives inside an ancient church in Babd al-Bid in central Mosul. He suggested that the group holds the captives for fear of a popular uprising against its fighters as Iraqi forces continue to successfully advance towards the province’s capital.</s>As advancing Iraqi security forces close in on the eastern edges of Mosul, the video shows several desolate streets. Few cars, few people.

The video begins in areas near the University of Mosul and then shows the blast walls put up in parts of the city and a few black flags of ISIS.

The footage was shot October 29 by the Mosul Brigades, a group of students and civil servants which launched an armed resistance to ISIS after the militants overran Mosul in June 2014.</s>BARTELLA, Iraq — Iraqi special forces paused their advance in an eastern district of Mosul on Wednesday to clear a neighborhood of any remaining Islamic State militants, as forces further to the south of the city took four small villages, military officials said.

In Mosul's easternmost Gogjali district, special forces could be seen going house to house while sappers searched the road for explosives and booby traps left behind by the jihadis driven out a day earlier.

Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, the top counterterrorism forces commander, told reporters a curfew had been imposed in the neighborhood while gains there were being consolidated.

"We fear that Daesh militants could attack our forces or the town with mortars," he said, using the Arabic acronym for IS. "So for the safety of the families we ask them to stay inside their houses." He spoke in the town of Bartella, some 9 miles behind the front lines.

Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil said that no advances were planned while high humidity and clouds obscured the view of aircraft and drones — a key component to the operations provided by a U.S.-led air campaign.

The guns were largely silent in Gogjali, which is inside Mosul's city limits but just outside more urban districts, although sporadic rifle cracks could be heard as well as some army artillery fire on IS positions. Fadhil said special forces had detained three suspected IS militants in the area.

The pause came a day after Iraqi troops set foot in the city for the first time in more than two years, gearing up for urban warfare expected to take weeks, if not months.

In the next stage, troops will have to navigate streets likely lined with booby traps, fighting house-to-house while trying to avoid killing civilians, more than one million of whom are still in the city.

Further to the south, where progress has been much slower, Federal Police forces captured four small villages outside the Hamam al-Alil area, over 19 miles from Mosul, the army said. The largest of the four is Min Gar, some 6 miles west of Hamam al-Alil, spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool said of the Wednesday morning operation.

Mosul is the last major IS stronghold in Iraq, and driving the militant group from the city would be a major blow to its ambitions of creating a cross-border "caliphate" stretching into Syria. IS announced the project in Mosul in 2014, after it routed the much larger Iraqi military, which had been neglected and demoralized by corruption.

However, concern over the fate of civilians caught up in the fighting has been growing, after residents reported that IS militants were rounding up thousands of people to use as human shields and killing those with suspected links to the security forces.

According to one account, the fighters went door to door in villages south of Mosul, ordering hundreds of people at gunpoint to march north into the city, where urban fighting is expected to be heaviest and the presence of civilians will slow the army's advance as it tries to avoid killing innocents.

In the latest international condemnation of IS, which has carried out mass killings of perceived opponents in the past and boasted about them in grisly photos and videos circulated online, the United Nations called on authorities to collect evidence of IS abuses of civilians for future use by tribunals.

The Norwegian Refugee Council warned that more than 1 million civilians trapped inside Mosul "are in grave danger" as Iraqi troops advance into the city.

The aid group, which works with refugees and internally displaced people, said that around 18,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since the start of the massive Mosul military operation over two weeks ago.

Its Iraq chief, Wolfgang Gressmann, said the agency's aid workers were "bracing ... for the worst."

"The lives of 1.2 million civilians are in grave danger, and the future of all of Iraq is now in the balance," he said

Adama Dieng, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the prevention of genocide, also expressed concern over "the increasing risk" of sectarian violence or revenge attacks during the Mosul campaign, especially where state-sanctioned Iraqi Shiite militias are approaching Sunni communities.

"Any kind of retaliatory violence against individuals on the basis of their membership of a specific group is unacceptable," he said in a statement released Tuesday.

Political rhetoric on the issue has been heating up, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently warned that Turkey would be closely monitoring Shiite militias' behavior in northern Iraq and seeking to safeguard the rights of ethnic Turkmens there. Erdogan said the Iraqi Shiite militias could prompt a Turkish response if they "terrorize" the Iraqi-Turkmen town of Tal-Afar.

On Tuesday, Turkey's defense minister said his country was making preparations for "all kinds of possibilities" as the Turkish military began deploying tanks and other vehicles to the border town of Silopi.

In a televised speech later that evening to praise the Mosul operation, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi downplayed an escalation. "We don't want war with Turkey. We do not want confrontation with Turkey," he said. But if one happens, "we are ready."

Separately, Amnesty International said government-sanctioned tribal Sunni fighters taking part in the Mosul operation had carried out revenge attacks against men and boys they suspected of being IS militants in newly-liberated areas.

Fighters from the Sabawi tribe, originally from Mosul, unlawfully rounded up civilians, beat them with metal rods, gave them electric shocks and tied some of them to the bonnets of vehicles and paraded through the streets or placed in cages, the London-based group said in a report based on interviews with local officials and eyewitnesses.

Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin and Brian Rohan in Baghdad contributed to this report.</s>(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Iraqi media outlets reported on Tuesday that the ISIS Operations Official was killed in the west side of the city of Mosul.

Al Sumaria News stated, “The ISIS Operations Official, Abu Yakoub, was killed along with one of his aides, in clashes with Iraqi joint forces at al-Shallalat district, which the security forces invaded on Tuesday.”

“An unprecedented state of chaos is prevailing at the west side of Mosul due to the advance of large vehicles equipped with heavy weapons towards the east side,” Al Sumaria added.

Earlier today, Iraq’s state TV said, that Iraqi forces stormed into al-Shallalat district, north of Mosul, and also liberated al-Samah district, west of Mosul, while the Anti-Terrorism forces freed the state TV office in Mosul from the ISIS fighters.

Iraqi government forces, Shia paramilitary troops and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, all supported by a US-led coalition, have been carrying out a major offensive in Mosul, the last Islamic State stronghold in Iraq.</s>Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, front left, the commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command, talks with a Marine Corps officer during a visit to an undisclosed location in August, 2016. Harrigian said Monday, Oct. 31, that coalition forces have plans to use air assets to target Islamic State forces if they try to escape Mosul, as Iraqi ground troops attack the city.

The U.S.-led coalition has developed plans to target Islamic State militants from the air if they attempt to escape the Iraqi city of Mosul and head west toward Syria, as Iraqi ground forces close in on the city from several sides, a top U.S. general said Monday.

“This is all about getting after (the Islamic State) and setting up an opportunity where, should they try to escape, we have a built-in mechanism to kill them as they are departing,” said Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, commander of U.S. air forces in the Middle East.

Blocking militants from escaping has been a key challenge as U.S.-backed Iraqi and Syrian ground forces have retaken towns and cities from the Islamic State. Hundreds of militants have managed to slip away.

The Pentagon has acknowledged there is no simple solution to prevent militants from grabbing civilian hostages or simply escaping in small numbers.

But the coalition is beefing up surveillance, and Iraq's government is encouraging civilians to stay put and avoid trying to flee, lessening the likelihood they will be grabbed as human shields.

Islamic State fighters have typically attempted to inflict heavy casualties on Iraqi and Syrian opposition forces before abandoning their positions and escaping.

In the Mosul campaign, Harrigian said military planners are focused on the western approaches of the city, which are not as well defended as the other sides. He spoke to USA TODAY in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Qatar.

“We’re very much focused there,” Harrigian said of the western routes. “Should they come out that direction, we’re prepared to get after them.”

The western approaches are not completely open. Shiite militias are moving into positions there and have said they will drive the Islamic State from Tal Afar, a town west of Mosul on the road to Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital for the militant group. The militias could act as a screening force to capture the Islamic State fighters if they attempt to head toward Raqqa.

But the Shiite militias present a political problem. The U.S.-led coalition said it would only support forces under control of the Iraqi central government. Many Shiite militias are influenced or controlled by Iran.

Plans for the Mosul offensive, which began Oct. 17, included a route to allow civilians to escape from the city and avoid its total destruction in case the Islamic State has nowhere to turn and tries to make a last stand.

“They don’t want to besiege the city and prevent civilians from escaping,” said Jennifer Cafarella, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War.

Such a plan also runs the risk of allowing some militants to escape to Raqqa. The Pentagon has said Raqqa is the next objective in the campaign against the Islamic State.

The coalition has between 15 and 20 surveillance drones constantly watching Mosul and the surrounding areas, triple the number over the city in the weeks leading up to the offensive, Harrigian said.

The Islamic State has frequently used human shields to avoid coalition airstrikes. Militants were able to escape from Manbij, Syria, in August with hundreds of human shields. Coalition aircraft will not target militants if there is a danger of killing civilians.

By contrast in Fallujah, a Sunni city in western Iraq, coalition aircraft killed hundreds of militants in June when they attempted to escape the city hastily. After hours of surveillance, coalition commanders determined there were no civilians in the convoy.

The Pentagon has said it has seen no signs that militants are attempting to escape Mosul yet in significant numbers. But that could change as Iraqi forces enter the city, and if militants believe defeat there is inevitable.

On Monday, Iraqi and Kurdish forces were nearing the edges of Mosul, where fighting will grow more intense as both sides engage in combat amid narrow streets and alleys. The city holds an estimated 1 million civilians and between 3,500 and 5,000 fighters, the Pentagon has said.

The Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL, has established deadly networks of tunnels and obstacles inside the city. Coalition aircraft have destroyed 55 tunnels and 33 car or truck bombs during the offensive.</s>A Iraqi soldier stands near a checkpoint as smoke rises from burning oil fields in Qayara, south of Mosul, Iraq, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016. The U.N. human rights office is lauding efforts by the U.S.-led coalition in the battle against the Islamic State group in Mosul. The office in Geneva says coalition flights over Iraq have largely succeeded in preventing IS from bringing in 25,000 more civilians to the city center, where the militant group has been using people as human shields as Iraqi forces advance on Mosul.(AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Iraqi army soldiers warm themselves next to a fire near the Qayara air base, south of Mosul, Iraq, Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016. The U.N. human rights office is lauding efforts by the U.S.-led coalition in the battle against the Islamic State group in Mosul. The office in Geneva says coalition flights over Iraq have largely succeeded in preventing IS from bringing in 25,000 more civilians to the city center, where the militant group has been using people as human shields as Iraqi forces advance on Mosul. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) Iraqi special forces forces raise an Iraqi flag after retaking Bartella, outside Mosul, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 21, 2016. Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition launched a multi-pronged assault this week to retake Mosul and surrounding areas from Islamic State militants. The operation is the largest undertaken by the Iraqi military since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Iraqi officials said they had advanced as far as the town of Bartella, 15 kilometers (nine miles) from Mosul's outskirts, by Thursday. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed) Iraqi special forces hold national flags after retaking Bartella, outside Mosul, Iraq, Friday, Oct. 21, 2016. Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by a U.S.-led coalition launched a multi-pronged assault this week to retake Mosul and surrounding areas from Islamic State militants. The operation is the largest undertaken by the Iraqi military since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Iraqi officials said they had advanced as far as the town of Bartella, 15 kilometers (nine miles) from Mosul's outskirts, by Thursday. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)

BARTELLA, Iraq | Iraqi special forces paused their advance in an eastern district of Mosul on Wednesday to clear a neighborhood of any remaining Islamic State militants, as forces further to the south of the city took four small villages, military officials said.

In Mosul’s easternmost Gogjali, special forces could be seen going house to house while sappers searched the road for explosives and booby traps left behind by the jihadis driven out a day earlier.

Gen. Abdul-Ghani al-Asadi, the top counterterrorism forces commander, told reporters a curfew had been imposed in the neighborhood while gains there were being consolidated.

“We fear that Daesh militants could attack our forces or the town with mortars,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for IS. “So for the safety of the families we ask them to stay inside their houses.” He spoke in the town of Bartella, some 15 kilometers (9 miles) behind the front lines.

Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil said that no advances were planned while high humidity and clouds obscured the view of aircraft and drones — a key component to the operations provided by a U.S.-led air campaign.

The guns were largely silent in Gogjali, which is inside Mosul’s city limits but just outside more urban districts, although sporadic rifle cracks could be heard as well as some army artillery fire on IS positions. Fadhil said special forces had detained three suspected IS militants in the area.

The pause came a day after Iraqi troops set foot in the city for the first time in more than two years, gearing up for urban warfare expected to take weeks, if not months.

In the next stage, troops will have to navigate streets likely lined with booby traps, fighting house-to-house while trying to avoid killing civilians, more than one million of whom are still in the city.

Further to the south, where progress has been much slower, Federal Police forces captured four small villages outside the Hamam al-Alil area, over 30 kilometers (19 miles) from Mosul, the army said. The largest of the four is Min Gar, some 10 km (6 miles) west of Hamam al-Alil, spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool said of the Wednesday morning operation.

Mosul is the last major IS stronghold in Iraq, and driving the militant group from the city would be a major blow to its ambitions of creating a cross-border “caliphate” stretching into Syria. IS announced the project in Mosul in 2014, after it routed the much larger Iraqi military, which had been neglected and demoralized by corruption.

However, concern over the fate of civilians caught up in the fighting has been growing, after residents reported that IS militants were rounding up thousands of people to use as human shields and killing those with suspected links to the security forces.

According to one account given to The Associated Press, the fighters went door to door in villages south of Mosul, ordering hundreds of people at gunpoint to march north into the city, where urban fighting is expected to be heaviest and the presence of civilians will slow the army’s advance as it tries to avoid killing innocents.

In the latest international condemnation of IS, which has carried out mass killings of perceived opponents in the past and boasted about them in grisly photos and videos circulated online, the United Nations called on authorities to collect evidence of IS abuses of civilians for future use by tribunals.

The Norwegian Refugee Council warned that more than 1 million civilians trapped inside Mosul “are in grave danger” as Iraqi troops advance into the city.

The aid group, which works with refugees and internally displaced people, said that around 18,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since the start of the massive Mosul military operation over two weeks ago.

Its Iraq chief, Wolfgang Gressmann, said the agency’s aid workers were “bracing … for the worst.”

“The lives of 1.2 million civilians are in grave danger, and the future of all of Iraq is now in the balance,” he said

Adama Dieng, special adviser to the U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the prevention of genocide, also expressed concern over “the increasing risk” of sectarian violence or revenge attacks during the Mosul campaign, especially where state-sanctioned Iraqi Shiite militias are approaching Sunni communities.

“Any kind of retaliatory violence against individuals on the basis of their membership of a specific group is unacceptable,” he said in a statement released Tuesday.

Political rhetoric on the issue has been heating up, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently warned that Turkey would be closely monitoring Shiite militias’ behavior in northern Iraq and seeking to safeguard the rights of ethnic Turkmens there. Erdogan said the Iraqi Shiite militias could prompt a Turkish response if they “terrorize” the Iraqi-Turkmen town of Tal-Afar.

On Tuesday, Turkey’s defense minister said his country was making preparations for “all kinds of possibilities” as the Turkish military began deploying tanks and other vehicles to the border town of Silopi.

In a televised speech later that evening to praise the Mosul operation, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi downplayed an escalation. “We don’t want war with Turkey. We do not want confrontation with Turkey,” he said. But if one happens, “we are ready.”

Associated Press writers Sinan Salaheddin and Brian Rohan contributed from Baghdad</s>Artillery and airstrikes pounded the city, still home to 1.5 million people, and residents of the eastern neighborhood of al-Quds said the ultra-hardline Sunni militants had resorted to street fighting to try to hold the army back.

Soldiers of the elite Counter Terrorism Service (CST) also entered the state television station in Mosul on Tuesday, the first capture of an important building in the Islamic State-held city since the start of the offensive about two weeks ago, the force commander, Lieutenant-General Talib Shaghati, said.

"This is a good sign for the people of Mosul because the battle to liberate Mosul has effectively begun," Shaghati said.

Iraqi troops, security forces, Shi'ite militias and Kurdish peshmerga have been advancing on several fronts toward Mosul, backed by U.S.-led troops and air forces. Special forces units sweeping in from the east have made the fastest progress.

"We are currently fighting battles on the eastern outskirts of Mosul," CTS Lieutenant-General Abdul Wahab al-Saidi said. "The pressure is on all sides of the city to facilitate entry to the city center."

He said CTS forces had cleared Islamic State fighters from most of the eastern district of Kokjali, close to al-Quds, on Tuesday, "so now we are inside the district of Mosul".

Blackish grey smoke hung in the air east of the Islamists' stronghold and the regular sound of outgoing artillery fire could be heard, said a Reuters reporter near Bazwaia, about three miles east of Mosul.

Inside the city, residents speaking to Reuters by telephone said they heard the sounds of heavy clashes since dawn.

One inhabitant of al-Quds district at the city's eastern entrance said bullets were fizzing past and hitting the walls of houses, describing the explosions as "deafening and frightening". Many people in the area have stayed indoors for the last two days.

"We can see Daesh (Islamic State) fighters firing towards the Iraqi forces and moving in cars between the alleys of the neighborhood. It's street fighting."

One witness said he saw nine cars, laden with families and furniture, heading from the eastern half of the to the west bank of the Tigris River to escape the encroaching frontline.

Away from the eastern fringe of the city, however, traffic was relatively normal, markets were open, and Islamic State fighters were patrolling as usual.

Mosul is many times bigger than any other city held by Islamic State in Iraq or Syria. Its recapture would mark the collapse of the Iraqi wing of the caliphate which it declared in parts of both countries two years ago, although the hardline Sunni militants have recovered from other setbacks in Iraq.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said on Monday that Iraqi forces were trying to close off all escape routes for the several thousand Islamic State fighters inside Mosul.

"God willing, we will chop off the snake's head," Abadi, wearing military fatigues, told state television. "They have no escape, they either die or surrender."

Commanders have warned that the fight for Mosul, which could be the toughest of the decade-long turmoil since the U.S. invasion which overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003, is likely to last for months.

The United Nations has said the Mosul offensive could also trigger a humanitarian crisis and a possible refugee exodus if the civilians inside in Mosul seek to escape, with up to 1 million people fleeing in a worst-case scenario.

The International Organisation for Migration said that nearly 18,000 people have been displaced since the start of the campaign on Oct. 17, excluding thousands of villagers who were forced back into Mosul by retreating jihadists who used them as human shields.

U.N. human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said Islamic State fighters tried to force another 25,000 civilians from a town south of Mosul back toward the city on Monday. Most of the trucks carrying them turned back under pressure from patrolling aircraft, she said.

Not all those heading back were doing so under duress from the militants, according to Mosul residents who said people were streaming in from the south as military operations edged closer to the city.

Most came without any belongings, though some brought sheep and a few camels into the city, they said.

In Bazwaia, CTS guards told Reuters that a suicide car bomber tried to attack their position early on Tuesday, but they halted it with machinegun fire. Rubble and parts of the attacker's body could still be seen by a nearby berm.

As well as the suicide attacks, the Islamic State militants have slowed the army's advance with snipers, mortar fire, roadside bombs and booby traps inside abandoned buildings.

In Bazwaia, recaptured by Iraqi troops a day earlier, about a dozen civilians could be seen coming out of the village, waving white flags and bringing with them their livestock—about 200 sheep and a few cows and donkeys.

Saidi, the CTS officer, said 500 civilians had already been moved from Bazwaia to a camp for displaced people further away from the frontline.

"We expect to encounter more civilians as we push through the city," he said.</s>US-backed Iraqi forces moved closer on Wednesday to a town south of Mosul where aid groups and regional officials say Islamic State has executed dozens of prisoners.

A military statement said security forces advanced to the edge of Hammam al-Alil, a thermal water resort, after an elite unit breached the eastern limits of Mosul, the ultra-hardline group’s last major city stronghold in Iraq.

The battle that started on October 17th with air and ground support from a US-led coalition is shaping up as the largest in Iraq since the US-led invasion of 2003.

Mosul still has a population of 1.5 million people, much more than any of the other cities captured by Islamic State two years ago in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.

The United Nations cited reports on Tuesday that Islamic State, also known as Isis, is attempting to displace Hammam al-Alil’s estimated population of 25,000 for use as human shields and protection against air and artillery strikes.

“We have grave concerns for the safety of these and the tens of thousands of other civilians who have reportedly been forcibly relocated by Isil (another name for Isis) in the past two weeks,” UN human rights spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said.

The town, 15 km south of Mosul, had a pre-war population of 65,000, a local official said.

Aid organisations, local officials and Mosul residents have cited reports that Isis has executed dozens of people in Hammam al-Alil and barracks nearby on suspicion of planning rebellions in and around Mosul to aid the advancing troops.

Abdul Rahman al-Waggaa, a member of the Nineveh provincial council, told Reuters last week that most of the victims were former police and army members. The men were shot dead, he said, quoting the testimony of remaining residents of the villages and people displaced from the area.

The UN has said the Mosul offensive could trigger a humanitarian crisis and a possible refugee exodus if the civilians inside in Mosul seek to escape, with up to 1 million people fleeing in a worst-case scenario.

The International Organisation for Migration said nearly 21,000 people have been displaced since the start of the campaign, excluding thousands of villagers taken into Mosul by retreating jihadists who used them as human shields.

Elite Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) troops were the first to breach Mosul’s official boundary this week. They said on Tuesday they were in control of the state television station.

A CTS commander, Lieut Gen Abdul Ghani al-Assadi told reporters in Bartella, a village west of Mosul, that the unit will pause its advance on the eastern front because of bad weather.

“God willing the next stage will begin within hours. This depends on the weather,” he said.

A curfew had been imposed on the recaptured eastern suburb of Kokjali, he said, to protect residents from mortar bombs fired by the insurgents.

Kurdish Peshmerga fighters are also deployed on the eastern and northern fronts, and Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militias are attacking Islamic State west of Mosul.

The involvement of pro-Iranian militias is causing alarm in Turkey which has had troops deployed north of the city since last year to train and support Sunni Arab volunteers who also want to take part in the battle.

Turkey’s army has begun deploying tanks and other armoured vehicles to the town of Silopi near the Iraqi border. Turkish defence minister Fikri Isik said on Tuesday the move was related to the fight against terrorism and developments across the border.

Turkey says it has a responsibility to protect ethnic Turkmens and Sunni Arabs in the area around Mosul, once part of the Ottoman Empire. It fears both PKK militants and Shi’ite militias, which the Iraqi army has relied on in the past, will be used in the campaign and stoke ethnic bloodletting.

Iraqi prime minister Haider al-Abadi told a news conference after a cabinet session in Baghdad on Tuesday that tensions with Turkey have eased in the last week, but warned that Iraq would respond to any “violation” of its territory.</s>(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Iraqi security forces shot down a drone belonging to the Islamic State extremist group, east of Mosul, Al Sumaria News reported on Wednesday.

Al Sumaria News stated, “Anti-aircraft weapons of Iraqi army and Anti-Terrorism forces managed, today, to shoot down a drone belonging to the Islamic State group in Kokjli neighborhood, east of the city of Mosul.”

“The drone was carrying large quantity of explosives, and was used by the ISIS when losing battles,” Al Sumaria News added.

Earlier today, Federal Police Chief, Raed Shaker Jawdat, announced, that his forces liberated 12 villages on the outskirts of Hamam al-Alil.</s>IRBIL, Iraq -- Facing Islamic State artillery, snipers and suicide attacks, Iraq's elite counterterrorism forces breached Mosul's city limits Tuesday, officers said, the first time government forces have entered the city in more than two years.

The advance from the east was a breakthrough in efforts over more than two weeks to reclaim Mosul from the Islamic State. But a great deal of fighting remains: Even as the counterterrorism forces try to push toward the center of Iraq's second-largest city, Iraqi army soldiers are approaching from the south.

The counterterrorism units, which have training and equipment from the U.S. and work closely with U.S. military advisers, moved into the Gogjali neighborhood Tuesday. The area was the first they reached within city limits after going village by village for the past two weeks.

Troops later entered the outskirts of the more built-up Karama district, said Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridi of the Iraqi special forces. As the sun went down, a sandstorm blew in, reducing visibility to only 100 yards and bringing the day's combat to an end.

"Daesh is fighting back and have set up concrete blast walls to block off the Karama neighborhood and our troops' advance," al-Aridi said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. He said bombs have been laid along the road into the city.

Later, al-Aridi said the troops had taken the state television building, the only one in the province, and that heavy fighting broke out when they tried to continue farther into the city. An official casualty report was not given, but officers mentioned one dead and one wounded.

Two officers reached by cellphone said the fighting had been fierce but that they were confident the Gogjali neighborhood, known for its cattle farming, would be secured soon.

"We are facing tough resistance," one special operations forces officer, Capt. Raad Hussein, said as gunfire crackled in the background. "But we will get it."

Staff Gen. Taleb Shighati al-Kenani, the top counterterrorism force commander, said on state television that "now is the beginning of the true liberation of the city of Mosul."

Tuesday's battle opened with Iraqi artillery, tank and machine-gun fire on Islamic State positions on the edge of Gogjali, with the extremists responding with guided anti-tank missiles and small arms in an attempt to block the advance. Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition supported the advance.

Col. John Dorrian, spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said aerial observations of the battlefield showed that Islamic State forces can no longer move in large numbers.

"If Daesh stand and fight, they're going to be killed. There's no question about that. If they run, they will either be captured or killed. They are not going to be allowed to escape," he said in a televised news conference with Iraqi forces in Qayara, south of Mosul.

"When we see them come together where there are significant numbers, we will strike them and kill them."

The U.S. military estimates that the Islamic State has 3,000 to 5,000 fighters in Mosul and another 1,500 to 2,500 in its outer defensive belt. That total includes about 1,000 foreign fighters. They stand against an anti-Islamic State force of some 40,000, including army units, militarized police, special forces and Kurdish fighters.

Inside the village of Bazwaya, 3 miles east of Mosul, white flags hung from buildings, put up a day earlier by residents eager to show they would not resist the Iraqi forces' advance. Some residents stood outside their homes, and children raised their hands with V-for-victory signs.

The families, estimated to number in the hundreds, will be evacuated from the village to a camp for displaced persons, said Brig. Gen. Haider Fadhil of the Iraqi special forces.

As the fighting raged on Mosul's outskirts, several of the newly displaced from Bazwaya could be seen carrying white flags as they drove a herd of some 150 sheep toward the camp.

Emad Hassan, 33, a former policeman, said he went to Bazwaya when the operation to retake Mosul started, after fleeing Islamic State fighters in the city.

"When I knew the security forces were serious about liberating Mosul, I came here," he said. "Daesh was preventing families from moving toward the security forces and ordered them into the city center, but I refused."

Aid officials, noting that as many as 1 million people could remain in and around Mosul, have been preparing for a new wave of civilians fleeing the area. More than 3 million people in the country have already been driven from their homes because of violence.

Some families were already streaming out of Gogjali on Tuesday, according to a witness and images on local television, but it was not immediately clear how many. The Iraqi government, dropping fliers over the city and broadcasting radio announcements, has been urging civilians to stay in their homes to avert a larger humanitarian crisis.

But if civilians do remain in their homes, it presents new challenges to the security forces, as the soldiers fighting in eastern Mosul found out Tuesday.

Brig. Gen. Abdulwahab al-Saadi, a commander in the counterterrorism forces, said he was surprised that so many families had remained in the neighborhood, which made it difficult for his men to clear the houses and check for hidden militants. Still, he said it turned out well because many civilians, waving white flags, cooperated with his soldiers and provided information about where Islamic State fighters were hiding.

Since the Mosul campaign began, about 18,000 people have been displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration, which on Tuesday described that figure as a low estimate. That could change in the coming days, as many of the villages secured outside Mosul over the past two weeks were mostly uninhabited.

At the same time, the Islamic State has herded thousands of civilians -- sometimes putting them in buses, in other cases forcing them to walk -- and moved them to Mosul to be used as human shields. That tactic, in addition to terrorizing the population, aims to make it harder for the U.S.-led coalition to carry out airstrikes without causing civilian casualties.

The Islamic State was able to seize Mosul and other territories in Iraq in 2014 by exploiting the grievances of the Sunni community toward the Shiite-led government, and by offering protection. Many Sunnis welcomed the group, but now most of the civilians who have fled lands the militants control say they came to detest the group's brutality.

"We thought they represented Islam," said Umm Ahmed, a woman who recently arrived at a camp east of Mosul for the displaced. "We thought they were good people. They were liars."

She said she had lost her 1-year-old baby as she fled the fighting in her village last week.

With her other children around her in the tent, she offered one example of the horrors of living under the Islamic State: Her 8-year-old son, sitting at her side, has mostly been out of school for more than two years.

In the first days after the militants took her village, she said, he and other schoolchildren were forced to watch videos of beheadings in a classroom.

"He had nightmares and was unable to sleep," she said. "Still, I am shaking when I think about Daesh."

With Iraq's focus on extremists in Mosul, neighboring Turkey is making preparations against another militant group along its border with Iraq. Turkey's defense minister said Tuesday that his country is preparing for "all kinds of possibilities" in deploying tanks and other vehicles to the border.

Fikri Isik said the deployment is in response to "important developments in our region," including events in neighboring Iraq and Turkey's fight against outlawed Kurdish rebels.

"On the one hand, there is a serious struggle against terrorism inside Turkey; on the other hand, there are important developments on the other side of the border," the state-run Anadolu Agency quoted Isik as saying. "Turkey is in the position of making preparations for all kinds of possibilities."

Turkish state media, quoting unnamed military sources, reported that tanks and military vehicles were moving from Ankara and the nearby province of Cankiri toward the border town of Silopi.

The deployment comes days after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned that Turkey would be closely monitoring Shiite militias' behavior in northern Iraq and seeking to safeguard the rights of ethnic Turkmens there. Erdogan said the militias could prompt a Turkish response if they terrorize the Iraqi-Turkmen town of Tal-Afar.

Last week, Erdogan also suggested that Turkey's military could pursue Kurdish rebels across the border into northern Iraq's Sinjar region, which he said was fast becoming a new base for the banned Kurdistan Workers' Party.

Turkey's air force regularly carries out raids in northern Iraq against targets of the Workers' Party, which has led a three-decade-long insurgency against Turkey from bases in northern Iraq.

Information for this article was contributed by Tim Arango and Falih Hassan of The New York Times; and by Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Brian Rohan, Sinan Salaheddin, Maamoun Youssef and staff members of The Associated Press.
Iraqi Special Operations Forces have fought their way into the outskirts of Mosul.