US: Attack on Bashiqa kicked off a larger Daesh assault

WASHINGTON

Daesh’s rocket fire attack on Kurdish Peshmerga forces positions in Bashiqa, Iraq, Wednesday “kicked off a battalion-sized assault”, along the Kurdish frontlines across the northern outskirts of Mosul that lasted throughout Thursday, a U.S official said.

U.S.-led coalition spokesman Col. Steve Warren told reporters that the coalition estimated that up to 500 militants took part in the offensive.

About 187 of them were killed by airstrikes alone adding that he was not aware of how many of the militants were killed by Peshmerga forces.

On Wednesday, the Kurdistan Regional Government announced that the Kurdish forces had killed at least 70 Daesh militants during the latter's assault on Bashiqa.

Daesh launched scores of mortar fire into Bashiqa Camp where Turkish Special Forces train Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Four Turkish troops were wounded and two Iraqis were killed in the attack. According to the Turkish military, Turkish forces exchanged artillery fire with Daesh militants.

According to Warren, the fight centered in three locations: Narwan, Bashiqa and Tal Aswad, a frontline stretching out from north to the eastern outskirts of the Daesh stronghold of Mosul.

Warren also told reporters that American forces did not take any part in the battle as they were far away from the frontline.

“Most of these [Daesh] forces came, really out of Mosul, which is kind of their center of gravity here in Iraq,” Warren noted. “This is the most significant attack that the enemy [has been] able to mount really since Ramadi. And again, if this is all they've got, things are going to begin to get worse and worse for this enemy.”

During a briefing in Erbil, Brig. General Mark Odom, U.S. Deputy Commanding General for Operations in Iraq said that the militants attacked in groups of 80 to 120 militants who were equipped with armored bulldozers, trucks with mounted machine guns and vehicles driven by suicide bombers.

“They were attacking the Peshmerga. I think their principal objective was probably to conduct a spoiling attack based on all the things that are going on both in and outside of Iraq,” Odom added.