The situation in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, rocked by blasts blamed on Al-Qaeda, is “worse than imagined,” the defence minister said, as troops were poised for an assault on the jihadists.The Iraqi Red Crescent, meanwhile, said the toll from one of the blasts, in which a building was obliterated and about 100 houses destroyed, was higher than reported by the Iraqi authorities, with 60 people killed and 280 wounded.
“The situation in Mosul is worse than imagined by far,” Defence Minister Abdel Qader Jassim Mohammed told a news conference late Sunday after touring the flashpoint city. Speaking at the army’s Nineveh province command centre in Mosul, he was highly critical of the Iraqi military’s deployment in Mosul. “The forces are scattered. We are working to unify the command. The military units are distributed in Mosul in a way that means they haven’t studied the area,” Mohammed told reporters, according to Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. “The 2nd Brigade of the Iraqi army works in the day and withdraws at night, leaving the insurgents free to move.