17 January 2017•Update: 17 January 2017
By Ibrahim Saleh and Serhad Shakir
NINEVEH, Iraq
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.
