Iraqi forces opened a safe passage for civilians trapped in Mosul’s dense neighborhoods on Sunday, allowing thousands to flee areas where Islamic State militants put up some of the fiercest resistance yet in the campaign to retake the city. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
The U.S. spent more than $160 billion to rebuild war-wrecked Iraq and Afghanistan, but there appears to be little appetite in Washington to fund a third big reconstruction era for Iraq’s ongoing second war. – Washington Times
The civilian presence hugely complicates the fight for the advancing Iraqi forces and for airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, a fact the Islamic State is using for its gain as it desperately tries to hold on to its capital in Iraq. – Washington Post
Villages recaptured from ISIS over the past three weeks by the Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi army forces on the road to Mosul have been honeycombed with tunnels, many of them booby-trapped. In the past three days, commanders say Iraqi forces have faced the hardest fighting of the offensive as they entered Mosul, made worse by extensive tunnels that are allowing ISIS fighters to appear seemingly out of nowhere, attack, then retreat to the hidden bunkers. – Washington Post
Islamic State fighters under siege by Iraqi forces have increasingly sent explosive-packed cars and trucks barreling toward the front lines. The Iraqi military’s answer to armored vehicle bombs is a Russian-made antitank missile mounted atop an American-made Humvee. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
After three weeks of steady fighting around the Islamic State’s stronghold in Iraq, U.S. commanders say the group’s defeat there is inevitable. But even once violence abates in Mosul, the broader fight against ISIS will be far from over. – Military Times
During the opening three days of the Mosul offensive, U.S.-led airstrikes rattled the city at a rate of one bomb every eight minutes, an official said. – Military.com
The Guards, a force of some 2,500 mainly Sunni Arab fighters from Nineveh province and Mosul, its regional capital, are trained and supported by Turkey — whose presence in nearby Iraqi Kurdistan and demand for a greater role in the Mosul battle has inflamed tensions with Baghdad. – Financial Times
Iraq's special forces worked Sunday to clear neighborhoods on the eastern edge of Islamic State-held Mosul as bombings launched by the extremist group elsewhere in the country killed at least 20 people. – Associated Press
Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces attacked an Islamic State-held town northeast of Mosul on Monday, trying to clear a pocket of militants outside the city while Iraqi troops wage a fierce urban war with the jihadists in its eastern neighborhoods. - Reuters