Mosul offensive, mapped; Baghdad’s thermobaric rocket tank; US reinforcing Europe’s northern flank; China’s military-robot contest; and a bit more...

Iraqi troops are racing to recover the bodies of fallen comrades. Day 11 of the Mosul offensive finds the Iraqi army trying to reach the town of Hammam al-Alil, about 20 miles south of the ISIS-held city, “where Islamic State has reportedly executed dozens to deter the population against any attempt to support the U.S.-led offensive,” Reuters reports. “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,” Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

Here’s a pretty good overview map of what’s going on around Mosul. As Reuters reported Tuesday: “The distance from the frontlines to the city ranges from just a couple of kilometers in the east, to 30 kilometers (nearly 20 miles) in the south.”

In five days, the number of displaced Iraqis has tripled from 5,000 to nearly 16,000, according to Reuters.  

Between 800 to 900 ISIS fighters are believed to have been killed so far in and around Mosul, CENTCOM chief Gen. Joseph Votel told Agence France-Presse in an interview this morning. Adds AFP for context here: “Earlier US estimates had put the population of IS fighters in Mosul itself at between 3,500 and 5,000. Up to another 2,000 were thought to be in the broader Mosul region.”

And one more note on numbers: official figures from Iraq have been all over the map. So here’s Reuters quoting “a senior U.S. official” who estimates this morning that there are “about 50,000 Iraqi ground troops… taking part in the offensive, including a core force of 30,000 from the government’s armed forces, 10,000 Kurdish fighters and the remaining 10,000 from police and local volunteers.”

Meet the TOS-1 Buratino, Baghdad’s thermobaric rocket tank. “A photograph and tweet from the Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman shows Iraqi troops posing with the rocket launcher near Bartella, a battle-scarred Assyrian Christian town less than 10 miles from Mosul,” writes War Is Boring’s Robert Beckhusen. “The Buratino — meaning Pinocchio — is unlike conventional artillery which lob high-explosive shells at long ranges. It’s more terrifying than that. The TOS-1 is relatively shorter range and kills almost entirely with pressure."

Beckhusen continues: "Each of the launcher’s 24 thermobaric rockets contains a flammable chemical which disperses into the air above a target. Once dispersed, the rockets detonate — and in a flash — devastate an area roughly 200 by 300 meters wide. The fuel-air blast has a hideous effect on the human body, rupturing internal organs and suffocating the lungs. As brutal as that is, the Buratino is precisely the kind of weapon the Iraqi army would want if it was worried about dug-in infantry, such as Islamic State fighters hiding in tunnels. But note — Mosul is also full of civilians.” More on that terrifying system, here.  

Who’s interested in a tour of the Q-West air base, south of Mosul? NBC News’ Courtney Kube, for one. She spoke with Votel and Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend on Wednesday, and files this report on the importance of the staging area there.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan vows to take Raqqa. “In a speech in Ankara broadcast live, Erdogan said he had informed U.S. President Barack Obama about his plans for the operation in a telephone call on Wednesday. Before Manbij and Raqqa, the operation will target the town of al-Bab,” Reuters reports this morning.

His remarks could have been, at least in part, a response to Lt. Gen. Townsend’s comments Wednesday to reporters that, to retake Raqqa from ISIS, “The only force that is capable on any near-term timeline is the Syrian Democratic Forces,” which number roughly 30,000 and include Kurdish YPG fighters that Erdogan doesn’t look too kindly upon.

Reuters quotes nameless U.S. officials to say that “Arab forces, and not Kurdish ones, are expected to be the ones to take the city itself.” Townsend, however, wasn’t comfortable elaborating on what would happen once the U.S.-backed SDF isolate Raqqa. More here.

Annual migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea have already reached a record level of 3,800 in 2016, AFP reported Wednesday.

Yet Turkey’s defense minister said this morning that NATO’s Aegean migrant-recovery mission needs to stop because it has reached its goal. More here.

From Defense One

Washington is Quietly Reinforcing Europe’s Northern Flank // Magnus Nordenman: Much is being done to counter Russian ambitions in the High North, and yet much more remains to be done.

CYBERCOM: We’re Ready For War // Nextgov’s Joseph Marks: Fort Meade says 133 Cyber Mission Force teams have reached initial operating capability, with full readiness two years away.

The Next President’s Headaches, According to America’s Top Spy // From the Council on Foreign Relations: Director of National Intelligence James Clapper discusses emerging challenges in U.S.-Russian relations, cybersecurity, and how his office views North Korea’s nuclear program.

The Syrian Kurds Try DIY Nation-Building in a Wartorn Land // Si Sheppard: The American military’s radical, unlikely, democratic experiment in northern Syria now teeters on a knife’s edge.

To Decode Duterte’s Doubletalk, Think “Expedience” // J. Weston Phippen, via The Alantic: The Philippines president flew to China and signed billions in deals, said he would separate ties with the U.S., then took it all back.

Why Clinton Gets My Vote // Former defense secretary William J. Perry: The veteran of GOP and Democratic administrations says Trump is unfit for the presidency.

Welcome to Thursday’s edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1914, the Royal Navy lost its first battleship of the war, to German naval mines. (Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.)

Tit, meet tat: One week after the U.S. Navy sent a warship past disputed islands in the South China Sea, Beijing issued a short-fuse notice to mariners: stay clear, we’re going to hold naval maneuvers in the waters between China’s Hainan Island and the disputed Paracel Islands. The U.S. patrol was the fourth “freedom of navigation operation” in the area in the past year. Via Japan Times, here.

Military robot contest wraps up: China’s answer to DARPA’s Grand Challenge is “Overcoming Obstacle 2016,” in which teams vied to demonstrate five categories of robots, including highly autonomous cars,  all-terrain autonomous vehicles, small, tracked robots, and more. Popular Science has the story, with pictures, here.  

The U.S. military targeted al-Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan for the first time in years, going after three top operatives this past weekend, The Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold reports. After “an extensive period of surveillance,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said “American drones targeted an al Qaeda leader, Farouq al-Qatani and his deputy, Bilal al-Utabi, by pounding two different compounds in Kunar province, where the two were believed to be.”

More on these guys: “Mr. Qatani was considered the top al Qaeda official in Afghanistan, responsible for planning attacks within and outside the country. He was a significant fundraiser and was thought to be planning attacks in the West ‘as revenge for the deaths of senior [al Qaeda] leaders,’ according to a U.S. official.” Adds Lubold: “It wasn’t clear what Mr. Qatani was specifically planning on doing.”

And Mr. Utabi “was considered the second- or third-most senior al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan, officials said. They said he was involved in many of the same kinds of activities as Mr. Qatani.” Read the rest, here. Or check out Long War Journal’s biographies on each of the two AQ operatives, here.

Out of Africa: U.S. personnel are flying Reaper drones from a Tunisian base to support operations in Libya, the Washington Post reports. Meanwhile, Reuters has this: “Islamic State-aligned group takes Somali town, say officials.” Move over Shabab? The two groups are officially competing for turf and status in Somalia, as Reuters notes.

NATO details upcoming troop and equipment movement in the vicinity of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. The broad strokes of the plan, writes Reuters, “is to set up four battle groups with a total of some 4,000 troops from early next year, backed by a 40,000-strong rapid-reaction force, and if need be, follow-on forces.”

The U.S. part consists of what U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter called a “‘battle-ready battalion task force’ of about 900 soldiers [that] would be sent to eastern Poland, as well as another, separate force equipped with tanks and other heavy equipment to move across eastern Europe.”

Britain’s part involves sending “an 800-strong battalion to Estonia, supported by French and Danish troops, starting from May” and “London is also sending Typhoon fighter aircraft to Romania to patrol around the Black Sea, partly in support of Turkey.”

Further, “Canada said it was sending 450 troops to Latvia, joined by 140 military personnel from Italy. Germany said it was sending between 400 and 600 troops to Lithuania, with additional forces from the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Croatia and Luxembourg.” More details, here.

Hypersonic missile-rattling from Moscow: Russia would like to draw your attention to its new Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, which it calls Satan 2, CNN reports, quoting Russian state-run media Sputnik with the sensational line that the rocket “is capable of wiping out parts of the earth the size of Texas or France.”

CNN with a little more on the specs: “The missile will have a range exceeding 11,000 kilometers (6,835 miles), TASS said. The warhead will weigh 100 tons and is designed as a successor to the R-36M Voyevoda.” Scare yourself a little more with this report on the rocket from RT.

The kidnapping business is still booming for Philippine extremist group Abu Sayyaf. They’ve reportedly raked in more than $7M in ransom payments, AP reports according to “a confidential Philippine government report.”

And a bit more from that report: “The joint military and police threat assessment report seen by The Associated Press on Thursday said the offensives have reduced the number of Abu Sayyaf fighters slightly, although the group remains capable of launching terrorist attacks. Government offensives have reduced the number of militants to 481 in the first half of the year from 506 in the same period last year but they managed to carry out 32 bombings in that time — a 68 percent increase — in attempts to distract the military assaults, the report said. They wield at least 438 firearms and managed to conduct a number of terrorist trainings despite constant military assaults.” More here.  

Make sense of all the drama and controversy around the enlistment bonuses story, thanks to this robust explainer from The Hill’s Kristina Wong.

Lastly today: The first women have graduated the U.S. Army’s Infantry Basic Officer Leader’s Course. Voice of America’s Carla Babb has a short story about the 10 women who received their Infantry Blue Cord at Fort Benning, here.