I suspect maybe that were moderate Iraqi rebels. Some freedom fighters, democratic forces. Like in Aleppo.
The Afghan president said something interesting today, he said with all of the US's precision bombs, why are they always killing Afghan civilians? I will say the same thing about Mosul. With all their precision bombs, why have so many people been killed? We can also say the same thing about Raqqa, where Assad has blasted the American coalition for the high death toll and destruction of infrastructure. Russia was especially annoyed at the indiscriminate bombing and death tolls by the coalition. The Syrian army took forever to free East Aleppo so as to avoid killing civilians, and they had set up safe corridors for the people to leave, yet the MSM kept blasting the Syrian government and Russia for endangering civilians. While in Mosul the coalition didn't even bother to set up safe corridors, instead they dropped pamphlets telling the people to stay in their homes and that they will not bomb civilians areas. We see how that turned out. This peaked my curiosity, so I checked to see what the religious make up of Mosul was, and if the majority are Shias. If so, then the indiscriminate bombing might be deliberate. Well according to Wikipedia, Mosul is 65% Shia and only 15% Sunnis. Yet the strange thing is that MSNBC wrote that the majority are Sunnis, and they feared the Shias might start killing them... when we see that the opposite is true. Seems like they used this as an excuse so they could have a predominantly Sunni army. I smell a rat.
I think you are probably misguided about what PGM's are, but in the end, they are still a bomb with a blast wave and fragmentation field that can be lethal whether the missile lands on its target or not. Laser Guided are particularly vulnerable to dust and weather interfering with the precision with which they hit their target.
It has been essentially an extermination of the rebel Iraqi military elements which have been calling themselves ISIS.
