MOSUL, Iraq
At least 16,000 Iraqi troops have been trained over the past four months to retake Mosul from Daesh, according to officials from Kurdish Regional Government in north Iraq.
Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL.
Officials said that a total of 16,000 troops from different regions of Mosul were trained. These include 8,000 soldiers from Bashiqa town, 3,000 from the Mahmur region, and 5,000 from the Sheyhan region of Mosul.
Iraq has plunged into a security vacuum since June 2014, when Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant stormed the northern Iraqi province of Mosul and declared what it called a caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
Soldiers and police in the region were trained in camps in Bashiqa, Mahmur and Sheyhan to use heavy weapons, destroy explosives and take part in the clashes, the officials said.
Turkmens, Arabs, Kurds, Shahbeks and Christian police in Mosul province were also given battle training in order to take part in the operation.
"Our four month training program has ended. All soldiers and police of Mosul received the necessary military training," General Vasek al-Hamdani, who is responsible for the Bashiqa camp, told The Anadolu Agency.
He emphasized that all the armed forces are from Mosul province.
He pointed out that Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga forces and U.S.-led coalition forces should take part in the operation for it to be successful.
In Feb. 19, a U.S. official announced that the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi forces plan to launch an operation in Mosul as early as April to retake the city from Daesh.
It would be the biggest battle since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve, which began last August with U.S.-led coalition airstrikes on the group’s targets, after Daesh swept into Iraq from neighboring Syria.
The Daesh massacres and the massive deportation of the population led to the creation of an international coalition against the terror group. The U.S.-led coalition has been staging airstrikes against Daesh objectives in Iraq and Syria since mid-September 2014.
