SOUTH OF MOSUL: The Iraqi army was trying on Thursday to reach a town south of Mosul where Islamic State has reportedly executed dozens to deter the population against any attempt to support the US-led offensive on the jihadists’ last major city stronghold in Iraq. Eleven days into what is expected to be the biggest ground offensive in Iraq since the US-led invasion of 2003, army and federal police units were fighting off sniper fire and suicide car bombs south of Hammam al-Alil, the site of the reported executions on the outskirts of Mosul, an Iraqi military spokesman said. The militants shot dead dozens of prisoners there, most of them former members of the Iraqi police and army, taken from villages the group has been forced to abandon as the troops advanced, officials in the region said on Wednesday. The executions were meant “to terrorise the others, those who are in Mosul in particular”, and also to get rid of the prisoners, said Abdul Rahman al-Waggaa, a member of the Nineveh provincial council. Some of the families of those executed are also held in Hammam al-Alil, he said. UN human rights spokesman Rupert Colville on Tuesday said Islamic State fighters had reportedly killed scores of people around Mosul in the last week. A Reuters correspondent met relatives of hostages south of Mosul. One of them was a policeman who had returned to see the family that he had left behind when his village fell under the militants’ control two years ago. “I’m afraid they will keep pulling them back from village to village until they get to Mosul. And then they will disappear,” he said, asking not be identified to protect family members still in the hands of the fighters. Islamic State fighters are keeping up their fierce defence of the southern approaches to Mosul, which has held up Iraqi troops there and forced an elite army unit east of the city to put a more rapid advance on hold. The fall of Mosul would mark Islamic State’s effective defeat in Iraq. The city is many times bigger than any other that Islamic State has ever captured, and it was from its Grand Mosque in 2014 that the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a “caliphate” that also spans parts of Syria. US Defense Secretary Ash Carter said on Tuesday an attack on Raqqa, Islamic State’s main stronghold in Syria, would start while the battle of Mosul is still unfolding. It was the first official suggestion that US-backed forces in both countries could soon mount simultaneous operations to crush the self-proclaimed caliphate once and for all.