The Kurdish fighters huddled in an abandoned home on the edge of Qarqashah, one of a dozen villages east of Mosul that was captured from the Daesh (the so-called IS) group this week in operations aimed at laying the groundwork for an advance on the extremist-held city. Like almost all the small villages retaken this week, Qarqashah was nearly deserted. That allowed the US-led coalition to clear territory using airstrikes, rather than relying on street-to-street battles by Kurdish forces known as peshmerga. But peshmerga commanders said their forces still took significant casualties. In Qarqashah alone, peshmerga commanders estimated they lost 10 men. The fighting continued even after the operation was declared complete on Monday. Maj. Gen. Hama Rasheed sat on a plastic chair inside the simple home his men were using as a base. Outside, his fighters exchanged fire with Daesh militants holed up in a neighboring village. Fields of dead grass burned from Daesh-launched mortar rounds. Kurdish and coalition forces stationed atop a nearby hill responded with volleys of artillery fire onto the Daesh fighters below. "The main aim of the operation was to open a strategic road to the Christian areas of the Nineveh plain" stretching north and east of Mosul, said Brig. Gen. Dedewan Khurshid Tofiq, one of the peshmerga commanders overseeing the operation. Tofiq said a bridge seized Monday could facilitate a troop buildup east of Mosul once it is repaired. The operation, which lasted just under 48 hours, is expected to be one of many aimed at encircling Mosul, Iraq's second largest city and the Daesh group's last major urban bastion in the country. The long battle for Mosul is continuing amid violence in much of the rest of the country. At least 20 people have been killed since Monday in attacks across Iraq. The deadliest occurred on Monday near the town of Rutba in the western province of Anbar, where militants fired mortar rounds on army troops, killing an officer, seven soldiers and a civilian, the Joint Military Operation Command said in a statement. Four attacks struck the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, on Tuesday. In the capital's southern Dora neighborhood, drive-by shooters killed a Justice Ministry employee, police said. Three bombings in different parts of the city killed eight civilians and wounded 22, they said. Another bomb struck a patrol of anti-IS Sunni tribal fighters in Madain, about 20 km southeast of Baghdad, killing two fighters and wounding five others, police said. Medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. Along berms marking the peshmerga's new front line with Daesh, convoys of hundreds of civilians fleeing villages outside Mosul drove through the fine desert sand in the intense summer heat. In one convoy, most of those fleeing were farmers. When Hameeda Muhammad's family was stopped by security forces to search their belongings for weapons she unloaded the animals that had died of thirst along the trip. A dead calf's body was dumped on the side of the road along with seven chickens. "Under Daesh, we stayed alive thanks to these animals," she said. She said the family was too poor to buy food after the militants took over and instead relied on subsistence farming. "I hope at whatever camp we go to there will be more chickens there," she added.
