Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi told his followers on Thursday there could be no retreat in a “total war” against the forces arrayed against them, as advancing soldiers battled the militants inside their northern Iraqi stronghold.
(Reuters)- Expressing confidence that his Islamic State fighters would prevail against Shi’ite Islam, Western “crusaders” and the Sunni “apostate” countries of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Baghdadi called on the jihadists fighting in the city of Mosul to “wreak havoc”.
“This raging battle and total war, and the great jihad that the state of Islam is fighting today only increases our firm belief, God willing, and our conviction that all this is a prelude to victory,” Baghdadi said in an audio recording released online by supporters on Thursday.
Iraqi regular troops and special forces, Shi’ite militias, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and other groups backed by U.S.-led air strikes launched a campaign two weeks ago to retake Mosul.
Winning back the city would mark the defeat of the Iraqi half of a crossborder caliphate which Baghdadi declared from the pulpit of a Mosul mosque two years ago. Islamic State also holds large parts of neighboring Syria.
In his first audio message released in nearly a year, Baghdadi called on the population of Mosul’s Nineveh province “not to weaken in the jihad” against the “enemies of God”.
He also called on the group’s suicide fighters to “turn the nights of the unbelievers into days, to wreak havoc in their land and make their blood flow as rivers”.
Those tempted to flee should “know that the value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame”.
Shortly after Baghdadi’s speech was released at around 2 a.m., residents said heavy explosions shook eastern Mosul. One said the militants fired dozens of rockets toward the Intisar, Quds and Samah districts where soldiers have been closing in.