VIDEO: Residents Cheer as Iraqi Army Seizes Mosul’s Intisar District

Dancing in the streets and ulalating as they welcomed the advancing troops, residents described life under the control of the militants.

“More than 30 times they (Islamic State militants) came to me and asked me to leave my house, saying that you have to leave the house, but I told them I will never leave my house until death. The man has to fight for his family, home and money,” Abbas Taha al-Ni’imi said, as he showed the damage to his house and his car, parked in the driveway but buried under rubble.

Other residents waved Iraqi flags from the top of their houses as a group of young men cheerfully displayed cigarette packs.

One woman collapsed against her husband with emotion.

Mosul, the largest Islamic State-controlled city in either Iraq or Syria, has been held by the terrorist fighters since they drove the army out of northern Iraq in June 2014.

The three-week Mosul campaign has brought together a force of around 100,000 soldiers, security forces, Shia militias and Kurdish fighters, backed by a US-led coalition, to crush the terrorists.

The territory taken by the government still amounts to just a fraction of the sprawling city, which is divided into dozens of residential and industrial districts and was home to two million people before it was captured by Islamic State.