Advancing Iraqi troops broke through the Islamic State group's defenses in an eastern suburb of Mosul on Monday, taking the battle for the insurgents' stronghold into the city limits for the first time, a force commander said. The move comes after two weeks of advances by U.S.-backed Iraqi forces who cleared surrounding areas of insurgents. The push toward Mosul is Iraq's largest military operation since the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003. Commanders have said the battle for the city, the terrorist group's last big bastion in Iraq, could take months. Troops of the Iraqi army's Counterterrorism Service moved forward on Gogjali, an industrial zone on the eastern outskirts of Mosul. The commander of CTS forces east of the city, Lt. Gen. Abdul Ghani al-Assadi, told state television his forces had reached the edge of the Karama district inside the city. A Reuters correspondent in the village of Bazwaia saw plumes of smoke rising from a built-up area a few kilometers away which a commander said was the result of clashes already under way inside Karama. A Kurdish peshmerga intelligence source said he had received a report that seven Islamic State operatives were killed in the Aden district, adjacent to Karama, and two of their vehicles were destroyed. Iraqi state television said there were also clashes inside the city between Islamic State fighters and residents rising up against the group. The Kurdish intelligence source said such "resistance elements" had opened fire on an Islamic State police unit in Intisaar district, south of Karama, and armed fighters had spread out in streets across the city, apparently fearing revolt. The government and its U.S. allies are hoping an uprising inside the city will help loosen the grip of the fighters, who seized it in 2014 and proclaimed a "caliphate" to rule over all Muslims. The fighting ahead in the city, home to 1.5 million people, will be more complex than the recent capture of Christian and Sunni Muslim villages and towns outside the city, which have been mostly emptied of their residents. Mosul is many times larger than any other city Islamic State has held, and the United Nations has warned of a worst-case scenario of up to 1 million people being suddenly displaced, requiring the world's largest humanitarian operation. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, speaking at the Qayyara military airbase south of Mosul, said 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 told state television. "They have no escape, they either die or surrender." Iraqi security forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters started the offensive against the hard-line Sunni group on Oct. 17 with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition. "They are making deliberate progress, they're on their timeline," British Maj. Gen. Rupert Jones, deputy commander for strategy and support of the U.S.-led coalition, told Reuters. The recapture of Mosul would mark Islamic State's effective defeat in the Iraqi half of the territory it seized two years ago. Ranged against them are some 50,000 Iraqi troops, police and Kurdish peshmerga, with air and ground support from the U.S.-led coalition. Thousands of battle-hardened Iran-backed Shiite militia fighters also joined the campaign west of the city two days ago. Hadi al-Amiri, leader of the Badr Organization, the largest of the Shiite militia groups, expressed hope that Mosul would not descend into a protracted and devastating conflict like the four-year-old battle for the Syrian city of Aleppo, where Shiite militias are also fighting. "We are afraid that Mosul will be another Aleppo, but we hope that will not happen," he told reporters in Zarqa, south of Mosul. Islamic State operatives have been fighting off the offensive with suicide car bombs, snipers and mortar fire. Islamic State said on Monday it had carried out a suicide operation against a joint convoy of the army and Shiite militias south of Mosul. It gave no casualty figures. Islamic State has displaced thousands of civilians from villages, bringing them toward Mosul and using them as "human shields" to cover their retreat, U.N. officials and villagers have said. The group has also set oil on fire to create smokescreens, choking the region in smoke. "Scorched earth tactics employed by retreating ISIL [Islamic State] members are having an immediate health impact on civilians, and risk long-term environmental and health consequences," the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said. The warring parties have given no casualty figures among their own ranks or civilians. Both say they have killed hundreds of their opponents. Meanwhile, Japan's top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga, confirmed on Tuesday that Japanese journalist Kosuke Tsuneoka, 47, had been detained by Kurdish authorities near Mosul. "We are aware that Mr. Tsuneoka has been detained by local authorities in the Kurdish region," Suga told reporters. "We will send our requests to local authorities for the appropriate treatment of Mr. Tsuneoka. They have already begun their investigations into the case and we are waiting for specific information at this time." Japanese media reported that Tsuneoka had been taken into custody by the Kurdish peshmerga force. Tsuneoka was abducted and held captive for nearly five months by a militant group in Afghanistan in 2010 while covering the battle there, and also in Iraq in 2004.
