The coalition has also provided training and deployed hundreds of advisers to work with Iraqi forces and select Syrian fighters, including the SDF.
Near Ain Issa, a foreign media correspondent saw at least one soldier who had US markings on his helmet with SDF fighters. Sello said the alliance had received new weapons from the coalition for the Raqa battle, including anti-tank missiles. Another SDF source said 50 US military advisers would be involved in the operation, particularly to guide air strikes. After it was seized by IS, Raqa saw some of the militants worst atrocities, from stonings and beheadings to the trading of sex slaves.
Last month, the US defence secretary said the idea of simultaneous operations against Mosul and Raqa “has been part of our planning for quite a while”.
But the battle for Raqa is far more complicated. After five years of civil war, Syria is divided into a patchwork of fiefdoms, with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, IS and a range of opposition forces all holding territory. Dominated by the powerful Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), the SDF has in recent months flushed IS out of swathes of territory in northern Syria, including the flashpoint town of Manbij in August. Washington has promoted the SDF as a key ally in the fight against IS, but the partnership is complicated by Turkey’s fierce opposition to the YPG.
Ankara considers the militia a “terrorist” group, and in August began its own operation inside northern Syria, targeting both IS and the YPG. Sello said the SDF had agreed with Washington “that there will be no role for Turkey or the armed factions allied with it in the operation” to capture Raqa. In Jordan, however, President Barack Obama’s envoy Brett McGurk said Washington was in “close contact” with Ankara over the assault.
“We are in close close contact with our Turkish allies and that is why the chairman of joint chiefs (General Joseph Dunford) is in Ankara today,” he said.
“It is a complex environment in Syria, to say the least, but we are constantly in touch with all the different players.” In Mosul, Iraqi forces were clearing eastern neighbourhoods, nearly three weeks into the offensive there.
“Resistance is very heavy and they (IS) have suffered major losses,” Staff Lieutenant General Abdelghani al-Assadi of the elite Counter-Terrorism Service told a foreign media agency. Soldiers from the army’s 9th Armoured Division also battled jihadists in a southeastern neighbourhood, a foreign media correspondent reported. IS has responded to the Mosul assault with a string of diversionary attacks.
It claimed responsibility for suicide bombings on Sunday in Tikrit and Samarra, two cities north of Baghdad. Officials said at least 25 people were killed and more than 50 wounded. Aid groups have voiced concerns for civilians trapped in both Mosul and Raqa, warning they may be used as human shields.
More than a million people are believed to be in Mosul. Raqa had a population of some 240,000 before 2011 but more than 80,000 people have since fled there from other parts of Syria.
