British warplanes have helped wipe out a large force of Islamic State fighters who ambushed Iraqi forces close to war-battered Mosul.
Two Typhoon fighter bombers were called in air-support after UK-trained Iraqi forces came under heavy fire from the ISIS attackers.
The pair of RAF FRG4s unleashed two Paveway IV precision-guided missiles at the gunmen, allowing Iraqi troops to clear the ISIS position.
Iraqi troops came under fire on May 11 as they patrolled 25 miles south west of the city of Mosul, the former ISIS HQ in northern Iraq.
It was in Mosul that the late ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced the so-called ISIS caliphate on June 29 2013 in the city's main Mosque.
Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces have been trying to stop an ISIS resurgence in the region since they were driven out of Mosul in 2017.
In recent months ISIS sleeper cells have been uprising but the RAF, patrolling from their base in Cyprus, have played a major role against the resurgence.
Thousands of ISIS fighters are thought to have gone to ground during a massive coalition assault on their forces in Iraq and neighbouring Syria.
Islamic State was allowed to re-activate cells after former President Trump in 2018 announced US troops would withdraw from Syria.
At the same time Turkish forces stormed large parts of north east Syria under the guise of creating a buffer zone against Kurdish fighters.
It was the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces who drove ISIS out of their Syrian HQ city of Raqqa and have struggled against the group ever since.
Islamic State grew from a breakaway al-Qaeda group in Iraq, originally formed by Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
His organisation was disenfranchised from al-Qaeda over its horrific treatment of civilians and its ferocious beheading rampages across the region.
A small number of British infantrymen and women in Iraq helping to train Iraqi forces who were driven out of their bases in 2014 by ISIS.
Islamic State was finally driven out of its last held ground in Baghouz, northern Syria in 2019.
