IS video reveals high-tech weaponised drone attacks in Mosul

IS' media office in Mosul put out the five-minute video this week of footage filmed from drones as they dropped bomblets on Iraqi security forces.

"Give them a nightmare from above their heads to keep them sleepless and vexed with drone aircraft," a voiceover says at the start of the video before an IS chant begins to play.

The short film shows the incredibly accurate explosives targeting gatherings of troops, tanks and military vehicles. The small bombs appear to leave several soldiers wounded.

Masters of invention, IS extremists have booby-trapped household appliances and turned cars into armoured suicide bombs as they try to hold back Iraqi forces advancing on Mosul

Last year, armed groups in the Syrian war such as Hizballah began weaponising surveillance drones and using them against each other.

	Iraqi forces retook the last area of Mosul east of the Tigris River on Tuesday [Twitter]

A video belonging to an al-Qaeda offshoot - Jund al-Aqsa - purportedly showed a drone dropping a bomb on a Syrian regime military barracks.

The newly released IS video shows off a leap forward in the extremist group's drone technology, last November the extremists were still making make-shift drones with wood and flying flimsy devices rigged with explosives into troops.

Iraqi forces retook the last area of Mosul east of the Tigris River on Tuesday, 100 days into an offensive whose next phase aid groups warned could have dire consequences for civilians.

Army units flushed out IS fighters from a rural area on the northern edge of Mosul, completing an important step in Iraq's largest military operation in years.

The three months it took to reconquer Mosul's east saw some tough fighting, but even deadlier battles are expected on its west bank, home to the narrow streets of the Old City and some of IS' traditional redoubts.

That has sparked deep concern among the aid community over the fate of the estimated 750,000 civilians still believed to live in western Mosul.

Tens of thousands of security forces now surround the extremists in west Mosul, who are all but trapped in the city where their leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed his "caliphate" in 2014.