Peshmerga troops realise that retaking the city will be no walkover as Isis digs in to defend its last urban redoubt in Iraq

The factory seemed to be abandoned, but the cautious peshmerga troops were not convinced: spotters had identified it as an Islamic State lookout point. As dawn broke over Mount Zardek, a column of Kurdish war wagons – armour, officers in pickup trucks, and troops on foot – stopped at a ridgeline above, and contemplated.

“They’re either hiding underground, or they have run back to tell their bosses that we are coming,” said one peshmerga officer, standing on the edge of Isis’s last battlefield in Iraq.



It wasn’t long before he was proved right. A shell crunched into the ridge to the left from somewhere in the distance. Another landed in a field below, sending a plume of soil up into the morning air.

The outskirts of Mosul, the scene of Isis’s first and most important conquest and now very much the key to whatever emerges from Iraq’s past three years of ruin, were only 10 miles beyond. But they suddenly seemed much further away.

Over the next four hours it became clear to the peshmerga creeping through the plain that they would have to fight for every yard. As they moved forward, the mortar fire intensified, landing either side of a hesitant line of troops and vehicles increasingly exposed by the sun that by now had risen over the dusty horizon. A pre-dawn dance around a burning orange oil drum, in which the peshmerga had sung along to victory hymns, suddenly looked decidedly premature.



Despite their earlier optimism, many of the Kurds riding into battle clearly had a sense this was going to be no walkover. Over the past two years, they have clawed territory from a diehard enemy who would often refuse to yield despite the odds against them. Car bombs and improvised explosions had been routinely used against the advancing Kurds, and today would be no different. A giant grey plume exploded from the plain as the first car bomb of the day detonated near the peshmerga advance guard.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peshmerga fighters react after a mortar attack. Photograph: Cengiz Yar/The Guardian

More mortars thumped into the soil. One to the right, another to the left and then a rising dread as the third invariably hit much closer to the convoy. “They’ve always been good at mortars,” said a peshmerga sergeant, who identified himself as Nechirvan. “These are all locals. They are ex-Iraqi army and some of them fought under Saddam.”

Ahead lay the first of three villages that the peshmerga intended to take. Heavy gunfire sent some units scurrying back along the track towards where diggers and bulldozers were ploughing the earth into defensive positions. Inside one freshly dug C-shaped mound of dirt, sat a unit of Syrian Kurdish peshmerga women cradling their rifles and wearing surgical masks to ward off the noxious air.

Battle for Mosul: Isis city under attack from Iraqi and Kurdish forces – live news Read more

The edges of the nearby villages were close enough to make out buildings and other homes – as well as the telltale of the terror group’s presence, black smoke. As the offensive intensified, large inky clouds of the stuff, so thick it could barely get airborne, rose slowly above the villages. More and more fires were lit by the Isis fighters until the discoloured air had matted together, making breathing unpleasant and bombing from the skies very difficult.



As the Isis mortars continued to fall, jet fighters soared through the sky, without dropping bombs, seemingly defeated by the haze of a medieval smokescreen. Outgunned and outmanned, Isis has often reverted to warfare from other eras - the first world war trenches it gouged to ward off the Kurds were visible everywhere, and the extensive tunnel networks Isis has borrowed from the same war almost certainly lay under the villages ahead.



The peshmerga women were itching to get involved in a fight that was by now raging further down the road. “Yes of course I know how much they would hate getting killed by a woman,” said Lt Nivan Vechivan, 23, a Syrian Kurd from Qamishli, who had been fighting with the peshmerga for the past four years. “It would be my honour to kill them,” she said, as her soldiers, all in their early 20s, nodded in agreement.



“We would all be martyrs if we had to be,” added another.



Minutes later, a large mortar thumped into the soil next to an armoured truck less than 40 metres away. Then came a second shell, which nearly scored a direct hit on a still-working digger. The Isis mortar team had maintained its range and rhythm, despite the Kurdish attacks.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A Syrian Kurdish peshmerga sniper takes aim during an advance on Isis territory. Photograph: Cengiz Yar

Back up the mountain, another smoke fire had been lit in an area that seemed to be behind Kurdish positions. The fire came from a cluster of homes set against Bashika mountain, which the Kurds had bypassed as they pushed ahead.

Speaking by telephone from within Mosul, residents of the besieged city said that Isis fighters had set fire to car tires in an attempt to camouflage their positions. “Daesh is collecting tires in the city in order to burn them at Bashika junction to prevent the planes from targeting them,” said Abu Sabra, using the Arabic name for Isis.

Two more mortars, which had to have come from the same area, crunched into the peshmerga command post, one damaging a home and the other nearly killing a group of men walking just below.



Further along the road to Irbil, a large empty refugee camp stood in the dust waiting to receive inhabitants who are yet to arrive. Aid agencies guess that more than 1 million people will attempt to flee Mosul and its surrounds as the offensive pushes closer. For now though, those who are able to leave are making long, difficult journeys to another camp, Dibaga. There, one man who arrived from Mosul on Sunday said the terror group was becoming ever more ruthless as pressure mounted on its last urban redoubt in Iraq.



“Isis became terrible with the residents lately,” said the man, 28, who claimed to have been part of a nascent resistance unit along with his brother, uncle and father. “Their situation is awful and they have started to flee. We haven’t seen many of them in the street lately, even at the checkpoints. There is no security. We’ve been arrested by them. They said we were [Mosul resistance]. They knew we were planning to leave and they came to my house. We decided to run, because they were going to kill us. We all left at night, all the women too. We went to another house and then we left the city through a farm.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A female Syrian Kurdish peshmerga unit pauses during the advance on Mosul. Photograph: Cengiz Yar

“You see them most at night. That’s when they leave their bases to make checkpoints and ask for identification. They’re mostly from Mosul. The foreigners left a while ago. I don’t know where they went. They have made a lot of trenches around the city. That’s all they can do. Burn things and run.”



Additional reporting by Salem Rizk

