Kurdish forces have fired rockets into Mosul for the first time since Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants overran the northern Iraqi city last summer, Kurdish military sources said on Saturday.

A Kurdish officer said 20 Grad missiles had been launched into Mosul on Friday after receiving information that ISIS militants were gathering to meet near the city's Zuhour neighborhood.

"We hit their positions," said Captain Shivan Ahmed, who belongs to the unit that fired the rockets from around 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Mosul.

Kurdish officials said the strikes had hit their intended target, but two residents of Mosul contacted by Reuters said three civilians were killed in the attack.

It was not possible to independently verify the accounts.

Following the attack, ISIS militants published images of a girl lying in a hospital bed, whom they said had been wounded by fire from the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.

U.S.-led forces also have carried out dozens of air strikes in Iraq to back up the Kurdish forces, the American military said Saturday.

Over the past 72 hours, U.S. and coalition aircraft conducted 46 bombing raids in support of Kurdish Peshmerga troops near Mosul and 80 hours of reconnaissance flights, the military said in a statement.



U.S.-led airstrikes regularly target areas outside of Mosul, but rarely strike inside the city due to concerns about civilian casualties.

A statement attributed to an unnamed senior Kurdish military source and posted on the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party's official website said the shelling had "struck great fear into the hearts of the terrorists".

Peshmerga forces this week launched a ground offensive northwest of Mosul backed by coalition airstrikes, reclaiming nearly 500 square kilometers of territory and cutting the extremist group's main supply line from the city to the west.

Twenty-one senior ISIS militants were killed during the operation, the Kurdistan Region's Security Council said in a statement on Friday.

It said the slain ISIS leaders included the head of Nineveh province's administrative institutions and a close commander of its special forces, the statement said.

There was no way to independently verify the claims.

Last Update: Wednesday, 20 May 2020 KSA 09:45 - GMT 06:45