An Iraqi government-sanctioned paramilitary force moved on Monday to capture a key town beyond the city of Mosul from the Islamic State group, tightening its grip on series of towns and villages near the Syrian border, officials said.

Backed by the U.S.-led international coalition, Iraq last October launched a wide-scale military offensive to recapture Mosul and the surrounding areas, with various Iraqi military, police and paramilitary forces taking part in the operation. The city’s eastern half was declared liberated in January, and the push for the city’s western section, separated from the east by the Tigris River, began the following month.

 

According to Shi’ite lawmaker Karim al-Nouri, the mainly Shi’ite Popular Mobilization Forces seeks to drive IS militants out of the center of strategic Baaj, west of Mosul near the border with Syria. Al-Nouri said the surrounding villages have already been taken from IS.

 

Once Baaj falls, he told The Associated Press, the fight with IS will move to the Syrian border. He didn’t elaborate.

 

“Baaj is a strategical town for Daesh as it is the last supply line” linking IS with Syria, said Sheikh Sami al-Masoudi, a PMF leader, using the Arabic acronym for IS.

 

“Once we reach the border, we will erect a dirt barricade and dig a trench to derail their [IS] move,” he added.

 

Hashim al-Mousawi, a leader with al-Nujaba militia, which is also part of the PMF, said the troops are ready to move inside Syrian territories but that this needs Iraqi government approval.

 

The Iran-backed PMF — known as Hashed al-Shaabi in Arabic — has largely operated since October in the desert to the west of Mosul, trying to cut IS supply lines.

 

In Mosul, Iraqi forces began a new offensive to drive IS militants from the remaining pockets of territory that the militants still hold in the Old City, in Mosul’s western half. The IS hold on Mosul has shrunk to just a handful of neighborhoods in and around the Old City district where narrow streets and a dense civilian population are expected to complicate the fight.

 

Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul fell to IS in the summer of 2014 as the militants swept over much of the country’s north and central areas. Weeks later the head of the Sunni extremist group, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced the formation of a self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque.
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Iraq’s Iran-backed Shi’ite paramilitary force said on Sunday it had dislodged Islamic State from a number of villages west of Mosul, scoring further progress towards the border with Syria.

The villages taken by the Popular Mobilization paramilitary force include Kojo, where Islamic State fighters abducted hundreds of Yazidi women in 2014, including Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar, recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought.

Kojo and the other villages of the Sinjar mountain region will be returned to the Yazidi community, a Popular Mobilization leader, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, told Iraqi state television.

Popular Mobilization is taking part in the U.S-backed Iraqi campaign to defeat Islamic State in Mosul and the surrounding province of Nineveh. The force reports nominally to Iraq’s Shi’ite-led government and has Iranian military advisers.

Iraq’s government is aiming to control the border area with Syria in coordination with the Iranian-backed army of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Linking up the two sides would give Assad a significant advantage in fighting the six-year rebellion against his rule.

The region immediately alongside the border on the Iraqi side is either under the control of Islamic State or Kurdish forces. Islamic State also controls parts of Syria.

Iraqi government armed forces are focusing their effort on dislodging insurgents from the city of Mosul, Islamic State’s de-facto capital in Iraq.

Since the campaign started in October, the insurgents have lost the city except for an enclave alongside the western bank of the Tigris river.

On Saturday Iraqi forces launched an operation to capture the enclave, which includes the densely populated Old City center and three adjacent districts.

The fall of the city would, in effect, mark the end of the Iraqi half of the “caliphate” declared nearly three years ago by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from Mosul.

 
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Video interviews with survivors of a deadly attack by Islamic militants on a bus taking Egyptian Christians to a remote desert monastery are painting a picture of untold horror, with children hiding under their seats to escape gunfire.

The videos surfaced on social media networks on Sunday, two days after 29 were killed in the attack on a desert road south of the capital. The Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack on Friday. It was the fourth attack against Christians in Egypt since December to be claimed by the IS. The string of attacks have killed more than 100 and injured scores.

One survivor, a small boy who seemed to be about six, said his mother pushed him under her seat and covered him with a bag. A young woman speaking from her hospital bed said the assailants ordered the women to surrender their jewelry and money before they opened fire, killing the men first and then some of the women.

The woman said the gunmen were masked and wore military uniforms.

Bishop Makarios, the top Coptic Orthodox cleric in Minya, the province where the attack took place, said the assailants told Christian men they ordered off the bus they would spare their lives if they converted to Islam.

“They chose death,” said Makarios, who has been an outspoken critic of the government’s handling of anti-Christian violence in Minya, where Christians account for more than 35 percent of the population, the highest anywhere in Egypt.

“We take pride to die while holding on to our faith,” he said in a television interview aired late Saturday.

Makarios confirmed that the assailants stole the women’s jewelry and his contention that the men were ordered off the bus before being killed was also confirmed by a video clip purportedly in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. This video showed at least four or five bodies of adult men lying on the desert sand next to the bus; women and other men screamed and cried as they stood or squatted next to the bodies.

Egypt responded to the attack with a wave of airstrikes against suspected militant bases where the military said the perpetrators trained. A manhunt for the assailants in the vast deserts to the west of the site of the attack has so far yielded no arrests.

In the Vatican, Pope Francis, for the second day in a row, expressed his solidarity with Egypt’s Coptic Christians following Friday’s attack. He led thousands of people in prayer Sunday for the victims, who Francis said were killed in “another act of ferocious violence” after having refused to renounce their Christian faith.

Speaking from his studio window over St. Peter’s Square, he said: “May the Lord welcome these courageous witnesses, these martyrs, in his peace and convert the hearts of the violent ones.”
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The Syrian government has asked Iran to take over the supervision and payroll of thousands of Shi’ite militiamen fighting alongside Russian and Syrian troops in support of President Bashar al-Assad, according to a government source and a news report.

 

The pro-opposition Syrian news website Zaman Al Wasel reported that it obtained a Syrian defense ministry document saying the Assad regime has approved a plan to give Iran responsibility for paying foreign fighters – mostly Shi’ites of varying nationalities. Shi’ite fighters mostly are paid in cash from Iran, the Syrian government and coffers of the Lebanese-based, pro-Iranian Hezbollah, according to analysts.

 

Iran would foot the bill alone in the future, a Syrian official told VOA on the condition of anonymity, confirming the Al Wasel report.

 

“The number of Shia militia has increased dramatically during the last two months,” the official said. “While a big part of these militia were recruited by Iran, a relatively big part was recruited by the Syrian government directly. We are speaking about more than 50,000 militants from different nationalities. The Syrian government requested that Iran provide for all of the mentioned militias.”

 

The document from Al Wasel put the number of fighters to be paid at 88,733 — a figure analysts say is exaggerated. They estimate that about 10,000 Iranian combat troops are in Syria fighting alongside thousands of fighters from Lebanon’s Tehran-affiliated Shiite militia Hezbollah and assorted Shiite militia made up of renegade Pakistanis, central Asians and other nationalities. Since January 2013, more than 1,000 members of Iran’s elite Quds Force or other elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units have been killed fighting in Syria.

 

Tehran says its forces are in Syria to protect the Zeinab Shrine in Damascus, a Shi’ite holy site. But since 2011, Iran has been a major backer of the Syrian regime in its war with rebel groups across the country, at first sending advisers, then forces from the IRGC and expanding far beyond the shrine area.

 

Iran has long expressed a desire to command a unified army in the region, particularly in Syria, and its growing power in Syria and Iraq is causing unease in Western capitals. In an interview with the Mashregh news agency last August, Mohammad Ali Falaki, an IRGC leader, announced formation of a unified army in Syria which appears to have come to loose fruition.

 

“It would hardly be abnormal for Iran’s IRGC to be controlling yet more Shia jihadists,” said Talha Abdulrazaq, a researcher at the University of Exeter’s Strategy and Security Institute.

 

In the long run, the formation of a unified army in Syria under Tehran supervision appears very practical, analysts say.

 

“It seems plausible that the Syrian government shift the responsibility for management and organization of the militias, especially where financial burden is concerned,” said Rasool Nafisi, a Middle East affairs expert in Washington.

 

Asserting its military prowess would help Iran push its political agenda in the region, some analysts believe.

 

“The bigger and more advanced army you control, the stronger voice you have,” said Daryoush Babak, a Washington-based retired Iranian military adviser.

 

But unifying Assad supporters under Tehran’s umbrella could worsen sectarian conflict in the region between Shi’ites and Sunni, analysts say.

 

Iran is looking for any chance to increase its influence and gain an upper hand against Saudi Arabia, its strongest rival in the war of minds and hearts, analysts say. Saudi Arabia and Iran support rival groups in Syria’s civil war. And In a speech in Saudi Arabia, President Donald Trump accused Tehran of contributing to instability in the region.

 

“Tehran and Riyadh … keep contradicting each other to prove whose ideology leads the region,” said Nafisi.

 

While Syria has relied on Iran militarily in the fight against rebels and Islamic State, it’s unlikely to grant Tehran a controlling foothold in the country, analysts say.

 

“In Syria, it is not likely to happen as long as the Assad regime harbors ambitions of regaining sovereignty rather than being reduced to an Iranian protectorate,” said Alfoneh.

 

VOA’s Noor Zahid contributed to this report.
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