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“Let there be no doubt, Mosul is a very big city and they have been working on its defences,” said Smith, who is the chief of staff of the U.S.-led Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command. “We are agreed that it is going to be a very tough, complex fight.”

“It really depends on the enemy,” said Anderson, who heads the coalition’s strategic advisory team, which works closely with Iraq’s security ministries. “One way to look at it is that there is a hard outer crust. It depends how soft and squishy the middle is. Getting through the crust will be hard. Once inside the crust we will see whether they stand and fight to the last man or run away as they did in Ramadi and Fallujah.

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“I think that they are on their back foot, I really do. The pressure has been relentless and it has been like that for six to eight months. Some of them have picked up sticks and been seen in Syria. The reports we are getting is that the morale in Mosul is quite fragile. We will see how it works. The war has a pace and rhythm all of its own. The enemy always gets a vote.”

ISIL revels in celebrating many diabolical acts including the sexual enslavement of women its captures. It has produced a seemingly endless stream of ghastly videos which depict prisoners being drowned, beheaded, thrown from buildings and set fire to in cages.

For Anderson one of the many reasons ISIL had to be eliminated was its “appalling” treatment of children as suicide bombers and its “craven willingness to hide among the civilian population inside the city or when they try to flee…