Hours after Mosul's municipal complex was declared liberated by the country's top military commanders and U.S.-led coalition officials, the wounded began pouring into a small front-line clinic just a few hundred meters away.

Iraqi forces launched a daring nighttime raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning on the sprawling complex of municipal buildings in western Mosul along the Tigris River.

Initially advancing some half a dozen blocks past the front line in armored vehicles, but breaching the complex itself on foot.

Snipers began to fire down on Iraqi forces from the buildings above and previously concealed suicide car bombs rammed their convoys. Ibrahim said he was trapped in the complex for hours as Daesh fighters moved out from uncleared neighborhoods and cut the routes his forces used to enter.

Initial advances in Mosul's western neighborhoods have been slow as Iraqi forces attempt to conduct simultaneous operations that force Daesh to spread out their defenses.

As Daesh counterattacks on the municipality ballooned, Iraqi forces responded with artillery Tuesday.

By afternoon, Federal Police units were being sent from the Tayran base to try and free the hundreds of troops in and around the municipality buildings and the front-line clinic was receiving casualties in waves.

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