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al qaeda in iraq

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Mosul airport has been recaptured by Iraqi elite forces from ISIS.

The operation took four hours. ISIS continued to fire mortars at the airport from further inside the city after losing the ground to the army.

The jihadists have also entered a nearby military base amid further clashes, a military spokesman said.

Eastern Mosul was retaken last month.

Today’s advance brings the army within less than a mile of western Mosul, where the militants are expected to launch attacks from densely populated neighborhoods.

The assault began with air strikes by the US-led coalition before armored columns advanced to the airport’s perimeter.

Image source Iraqi News

Iraqi forces also came under fire from ISIS militants holed up inside airport buildings, reports said.

Foreign troops from the US-led coalition were with the attacking troops, officials told the Associated Press, without specifying their nationality.

According to reports, the airport’s runway has been destroyed by ISIS.

The airport and the al-Ghazlani base are on Mosul’s southern outskirts on the western side of the Tigris River.

Thousands of Iraqi troops, backed by artillery and air power, are involved in the assault to retake Mosul.

Leaflets warning residents of an imminent offensive were earlier dropped over western Mosul, where military officials say narrow winding streets could make retaking the area particularly difficult.

Although slightly smaller than the east, western Mosul is more densely populated and includes districts seen as pro-ISIS.

The UN has voiced concern about the welfare of civilians trapped in the city.

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Iraqi authorities say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America.

Iraqi defense ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months.

Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added.

Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops.

Mohammed al-Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a “safe” distance of 1.5 km (0.9 miles).

All of the arrested men had confessed to the plot, and said they had received instruction from another al-Qaeda offshoot, he added.

As the defense ministry spokesman spoke on Iraqi TV, footage was shown of four men with black hoods on their heads, our correspondent adds. Three of them were wearing bright yellow jumpsuits and a fourth was in a brown jumpsuit.

Iraqi authorities have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons

Iraqi authorities have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons

Their arrests were possible because of co-operation between Iraqi and foreign intelligence services, Mohammed al-Askari said.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq is believed the only offshoot of the Islamist militant network to have used chemical weapons.

It detonated a 16 crude chlorine bombs in Iraq between October 2006 and June 2007.

Chlorine inhalation made many hundreds of people sick, but no deaths resulting from exposure to the chemical were recorded, US officials said at the time. Instead, the bomb blasts are believed to have caused the fatalities.

At the time, US officials said al-Qaeda appeared to want to use debilitating agents like chlorine in their bombs to cause casualties beyond those hit by the initial explosion.

US and Iraqi troops subsequently killed or detained many of the militants who were building the chlorine-laced bombs and seized much of their stockpiled chemicals.

A letter written by the late al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden five days before he was killed in a US military raid in Pakistan in 2011 urged members of the group’s offshoot in Yemen who he believed were considering using “poison” to be “careful of doing it without enough study of all aspects, including political and media reaction”, according to CNN.

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