This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Iraqi Shia militias have launched an offensive to the west of Mosul in an operation intended to tighten the noose around Islamic State’s Iraq stronghold. But the move has alarmed Turkey and could inflame tensions in the mainly Sunni area.

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A spokesman for the Shia militias, known as the Hashid Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) forces, said thousands of fighters “started operations [on Saturday] morning to clean up the hotbeds of Daesh [Islamic State] in the western parts of Mosul”.

The militias aim to capture villages west of Mosul and reach the town of Tal Afar, about 35 miles from the city, the Hashid spokesman said. Their goal is to cut off any retreat by Islamic State insurgents into neighbouring Syria or any reinforcement for their defence of Mosul.

But their deployment close to the border with neighbouring Turkey prompted a warning from that nation’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who said Ankara aims to reinforce its troops on the frontier and threatened a “different response” for the militias if they “unleash terror” in Tal Afar.

Turkish troops have been training Sunni tribal combatants at an Iraqi camp north-east of Mosul, but a spokesman for the Shia militias said earlier on Saturday the Turks were in no position to obstruct their advance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Iraqi families displaced by the operation arrive at a refugee camp south of Mosul. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

The Iran-backed and battle-hardened paramilitaries bring additional firepower to the nearly two-week-old campaign to recapture Iraq’s second largest city from the jihadi group.

Iraqi soldiers and security forces and Kurdish peshmerga fighters, backed by a US-led air coalition and thousands of western military personnel, have been advancing in the last 13 days on the southern, eastern and north-eastern fronts around Mosul, which remains home to 1.5 million people.

