Two BBC journalists embedded with Iraqi army forces trying to recapture Mosul narrowly cheated death in an Islamic State attack.

Reporter Feras Kilani and cameraman Marek Polaszewski were following soldiers going door to door to clear homes of suspected militants when a car bomb exploded. Video footage shows IS launching a full attack in the confusion that follows.

Mr Kilani, who works for the BBC Arabic Service, said it took three hours for the Iraqi forces to contain the attack.

“The speed of the advance into Mosul has surprised many but the army has only reached the edge of the city and there is still a long way to go,” says Mr Kilani in the report.

CNN reporter Arwa Damon, and her cameraman, Brice Lane, were caught-up in an attack in Mosul on Friday when the Iraqi army convoy they were travelling in was rammed by a car suicide bomber.

The journalists fled as the soldiers came under fire hiding in nearby homes for more than a day before back-up forces arrived.

BBC Arabic team narrowly escapes IS suicide car bomb attack in Iraq's Mosul pic.twitter.com/jf1yuCSxro — David Vujanovic (@DavidVujanovic) November 6, 2016

Kurdish peshmerga forces today (Mon) attacked an IS-held town northeast of Mosul trying to clear a pocket of militants outside the city. It came as Iraqi troops continued a fierce urban war with the jihadists in Mosul’s eastern neighbourhoods.

The first waves of a 2,000-strong peshmerga force entered Bashiqa after artillery pounded the town at the foot of a mountain about 10 miles across the Nineveh plains from Mosul.

Lieutenant-Colonel Safeen Rasoul told Reuters: “Our aim is to take control and clear out all the Daesh (Islamic State) militants. Our estimates are there are about 100 still left and 10 suicide cars.”

Islamic State fighters have tried to slow the offensive on their Mosul stronghold, which entered its fourth week with waves of suicide car bomb attacks. Iraqi commanders say there have been 100 on the eastern front and 140 in the south.

Mosul, the largest IS-controlled city in either Iraq or Syria, has been held by the group since its fighters drove the army out of northern Iraq in June 2014.

Across the border, US-backed Syrian fighters have launched their own campaign, called Euphrates Anger, to recapture Islamic State’s Syrian bastion of Raqqa.

Twin offensives on Raqqa and Mosul could bring to an end the self-styled caliphate declared by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque in 2014.