Residents of the Iraqi city of Mosul have said up to 30 civilians were killed in an airstrike on a district held by Islamic State this week.



The witnesses said it was not immediately clear if the attack was carried out by the US-led coalition fighting Isis, or by Iraqi forces that have been making advances in the city.

They said they saw at least three missiles hit the western Mosul al-Jadida area on Thursday, in a raid that appeared to target the house of senior militant Harbi Abdel Qader.

He was not in the building at the time, but several members of his family died, one resident said late on Friday.

Iraq Body Count, a group run by academics and peace activists that has counted violent deaths in the country since 2003, said 21 to 25 civilians were reported killed on Thursday in a strike on that area.

The accounts could not be verified independently.

Areas of Mosul west of the River Tigris, which bisects the city from north to south, are still controlled by the ultra-hardline militant group. Almost all of the east has been recaptured by US-backed Iraqi forces fighting to drive the jihadists out of the city, Isis’s last major stronghold in Iraq.

Government troops retook the eastern edge of a third bridge in Mosul on Saturday and a cluster of buildings inside Mosul university, according to a senior Iraqi officer overseeing the operation.

Warplanes from the US-led coalition bombed the city’s bridges late last year in an effort to isolate Isis fighters.

At the university on Saturday, senior commanders said Iraqi forces had secured more than half of the campus despite stiff resistance, but clashes were ongoing.

Iraqi forces entered the university from the south-east on Friday morning and by nightfall had secured a handful of buildings, Brig Gen Haider Fadhil and Lt Gen Abdul-Wahab al-Saadi said.

“We watched all the Isis fighters gather in that building, so we blew it up,” said special forces Sgt Maj Haytham Ghani, pointing to one of the blackened technical college buildings where charred desks could be seen inside.

“You can still see some of their corpses,” he said.

Medics operating a small field hospital in eastern Mosul said civilian casualties had dropped significantly over the past three days, as Iraqi forces moved into government complexes like the university rather than dense civilian neighborhoods.