PMU battle tank
The Iraqi Army and the Kurdish Peshmerga have reportedly launched a fresh offensive around Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul, controlled by the ISIS terrorist group.
On June 15, Iraqi forces launched a multi-pronged offensive, aiming to encircle and then liberate Mosul, located in the province of Nineveh.
Some 6,000 Peshmerga troops are participating in the operation alongside the Iraqi military and U.S. AH-64 Apache attack helicopters are deployed to support the offensive.
The Popular Mobilization Units (PMU), a brand of different Shia militias, have also announced that they will join the Mosul operation.
Amid the growing assurance, that ISIS has lost a strategic initiative and is collapsing in Syria and Iraq, relations between different anti-ISIS powers become a main concern of the experts.
In Iraq, this means that all players – the government, Shia militias and Kurds – are interested to strengthen their positions on the ground as much territories as they can.