AS DAWN broke, hundreds of armoured vehicles, bulldozers and pick-up trucks, some with improvised bulletproof steel plates bolted on their sides, trundled in convoy across the desert plain.

They moved slowly, wary of the inevitable “roadside” bombs on the dusty track ahead and the appearance of suicide bombers hurtling trucks laden with tons of explosives in their direction.

On board the convoy’s motley assortment of vehicles were thousands of Kurdish peshmerga fighters, tasked with opening up the biggest military offensive yet against Islamic State (IS) cadres who have held Iraq’s second largest city Mosul for two years.

“Today we will kill Daesh, the time has come to push them from our country and make our people free,” said Ferhat, a young peshmerga fighter adopting the commonly used Arabic acronym in Iraq for the IS jihadists.

The military campaign to retake Mosul by the Iraqi Army and Kurdish peshmerga fighters remains one of the defining moments in the Middle East over the last 12 months. That battle is not yet over, with phase two of the operation launched this week.

Only the Syrian civil war’s battle for eastern Aleppo between Syrian government forces supported by Russian warplanes and allied militias against rebel forces, garnered more headlines from this troubled region.

Who can forget the haunting image of shell-shocked five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, sitting on an orange chair inside an ambulance covered in blood and dust following an air strike on the rebel-held Aleppo neighbourhood of Qaterji in August?

As the cluster and barrel bombs rained down on civilian homes and hospitals and even a UN aid convoy, Aleppo became a latter day Guernica, the town destroyed by bombardment during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

Elsewhere, too, the Middle East twisted in the maelstrom of conflict. After more than a year and a half of Saudi-led air strikes and civil war, at least 10,000 people have been killed in one of the world’s most neglected and underreported wars in Yemen.

While the United States supports its ally Saudi Arabia in its military operation in Yemen, Britain also continues to help supply Riyadh with weapons, causing political controversy and outrage here at home as civilians bear the brunt of the onslaught.

As the fighting rages, the Yemeni state has disintegrated, leaving 21 million people – 86 per cent of the population – in need of humanitarian aid.

According to the British charity Oxfam, more than 47 million people across the Middle East – a number equivalent to three quarters of the UK population – are badly in need of humanitarian aid as 2016 draws to a close.

The fighting in Syria, Iraq and Yemen has left tens of millions of people facing a humanitarian crisis and fuelled an influx of refugees in Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan.

That boiled over into what became one of the Middle East’s other biggest stories of the year, the coup attempt by factions of the army in Turkey to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Today, the subsequent crackdown on those suspected of being involved in the putsch continues, with hundreds of thousands of Turks arrested or purged from their jobs.

As the Middle East became broiled in conflict so its fallout spread on to Europe’s streets and beyond as Islamist inspired jihadist terrorists struck time and again.

In Brussels IS claimed responsibility for a coordinated attack on the airport and the city’s metro, which killed 32 people. In the French city of Nice a jihadist drove a lorry through crowds celebrating Bastille Day, leaving 86 people dead. In Orlando an IS-inspired gunman killed 49 people at a gay nightclub, America’s worst attack since 9/11.

In Berlin and Baghdad, Paris and Kabul, the gunmen and bombers brought their brand of terror.

“Lone wolves” and “homegrown” jihadists became bywords leaving many shocked, bewildered and giving rise to a right-wing and anti-immigration backlash that will play its part in forthcoming elections in countries like France and Germany.

Talk of a Russian and Turkish brokered ceasefire in Syria gives some cause for optimism, but most likely it will not bring an end to the war there.

Elsewhere, that long running sore of Israel-Palestine has also threatened to rear its head, as Donald Trump take over as US President.

Already the president-elect has pledged to repair the damage caused to Israel by the refusal of Barack Obama’s outgoing US administration to veto a Security Council resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The coming year in the Middle East looks ominous indeed.