Mosul victory imminent as Islamic State lines collapse: Iraqi military

Members of the Emergency Response Division celebrate in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq July 8, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

By Stephen Kalin and Maher Chmaytelli

MOSUL/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi security forces expect to take full control of Mosul within hours as Islamic State’s defensive lines crumble in its former de facto capital in Iraq, military commanders said on Saturday.

Dozens of soldiers celebrated amid the rubble on the banks of the Tigris river without waiting for a formal victory declaration, some dancing to music blaring out from a truck and firing machineguns into the air, a Reuters correspondent said.

The mood was less festive, however, among some of the nearly one million Mosul residents displaced by months of combat, many of whom are living in camps outside the city with little respite from the blazing summer heat.

“If there is no rebuilding and people don’t return to their homes and regain their belongings, what is the meaning of liberation?” Mohammed Haji Ahmed, 43, a clothing trader, told Reuters in the Hassan Sham camp to the east of Mosul.

“We are seeing now the last meters (yards) and then final victory will be announced,” a television presenter said, citing the channel’s correspondents embedded with security forces fighting in Islamic State’s (IS) redoubt in the Old City of Mosul, by the Tigris. “It’s a matter of hours,” she said.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support to the eight-month campaign to wrest back Mosul, by far the largest city seized by Islamic State in 2014.

Almost exactly three years ago, the ultra-hardline group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared from Mosul a “caliphate” over adjoining parts of Iraq and Syria.

ARTILLERY EXPLOSIONS, GUNFIRE

A military spokesman cited by the TV said the insurgents’ defense lines were collapsing. Iraqi commanders say the militants were fighting for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, forcing security forces to fight house-to-house in the densely populated maze of narrow alleyways.

Dozens of insurgents were killed on Saturday and others tried to escape by swimming across Tigris, state TV said.

“The battle has reached the phase of chasing the insurgents in remaining blocks,” the Iraqi military media office said in a statement. “Some members of Daesh have surrendered,” it added, using an Arab acronym of Islamic State.

Artillery explosions and gunfire could still be heard during Saturday afternoon and a column of smoke billowed over the Old City riverside, the Reuters correspondent said.

The road where the soldiers celebrated was scarred with gaping holes from explosions and rubble from a flattened multi-storey shopping mall. Rubbish and ammunition boxes were strewn around and there was no sign of civilians.

Months of urban warfare has displaced 900,000 people, about half the city’s pre-war population, and killed thousands, according to aid organizations.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared the end of Islamic State’s “state of falsehood” a week ago, after security forces took Mosul’s medieval Grand al-Nuri mosque – although only after retreating militants blew it up.

Stripped of Mosul, Islamic State’s dominion in Iraq will be reduced to mainly rural, desert areas west and south of the city where tens of thousands of people live. The militants are expected to keep up attacks on selected targets across Iraq.

The United Nations predicts it will cost more than $1 billion to repair basic infrastructure in Mosul. In some of the worst affected areas, almost no buildings appear to have escaped damage and Mosul’s dense construction means the extent of the devastation might be underestimated, U.N. officials said.

The fall of Mosul also exposes ethnic and sectarian fractures between Arabs and Kurds over disputed territories or between Sunnis and the Shi’ite majority that have plagued Iraq for more than a decade..

During their impromptu victory celebrations, some of the Iraqi soldiers waved pictures of Hussein, the grand son of prophet Mohammed who is immensely revered by the Shi’ites.

Mosul is a majority Sunni city who has long complained of being marginalized by the Shi’ite-led governments installed after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s regional Kurdish leader said this week that the government in Baghdad had failed to prepare a post-battle political, security and governance plan.

(Additional reporting by Isabel Coles in Hassan Sham camp; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Helen Popper)

Global inquiry aims to report on Syria sarin attack by October

A civil defence member breathes through an oxygen mask, after what rescue workers described as a suspected gas attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun in rebel-held Idlib, Syria April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Ammar Abdullah

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – An international inquiry aims to report by October on who was to blame for a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria in April, the head of the probe said on Thursday, as he appealed for countries to back off and stop telling investigators how to do their work.

While Edmond Mulet, head of the joint United Nations and Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) inquiry, did not name any countries, diplomats said Russia regularly pressured the investigators.

“We do receive, unfortunately, direct and indirect messages all the time, from many sides, telling us how to do our work,” Mulet told reporters after briefing the U.N. Security Council.

“Some of those messages are very clearly saying if we don’t do our work according to them … they will not accept the conclusions,” he said. “I appeal to all … let us perform our work in an impartial, independent and professional manner,” he said, adding the results would be presented in October.

Syrian-ally Russia has publicly questioned the work of the inquiry, which was created by the Security Council in 2015, and said the findings cannot be used to take U.N. action and that the Syrian government should investigate the accusations.

The inquiry has so far blamed Syrian government forces for three chlorine gas attacks in 2014 and 2015 and Islamic State militants used mustard gas in 2015. In response to those findings Western powers tried to impose U.N. sanctions on Syria in February but this effort was blocked by Russia and China.

The Syrian government has repeatedly denied using chemical weapons.

Investigators are currently looking at two cases – the exposure of two Syrian women to sulfur mustard in an apparent attack in Um Hosh, Aleppo last September and a deadly April 4 sarin attack in the town of Khan Sheikhoun that prompted the United States to launch missile strikes on a Syrian air base.

In both cases an OPCW fact finding mission has already determined that chemical weapons were used. Western governments have blamed the Syrian government for the Khan Sheikhoun attack, which killed dozens of people. Syria has denied any involvement.

Syria agreed to destroy its chemical weapons in 2013 under a deal brokered by Russia and the United States.

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by Frances Kerry)

Mosul population ‘traumatized’ by conflict, infrastructure badly damaged

Destroyed building and cars in the Old City. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

By Stephanie Nebehay and Stephen Kalin

GENEVA/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – The population of Mosul has endured huge suffering in the war to retake the northern Iraqi city from Islamic State and trauma cases among civilians are sharply rising in the last stages of battle, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) said on Wednesday.

The city’s basic infrastructure has also been hard hit, with six western districts almost completely destroyed and initial repairs expected to cost more than $1 billion, the United Nations said.

Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped among the shattered buildings in Islamic State’s final redoubt in Mosul’s Old City by the western bank of the Tigris river, MSF said.

Civilians who have managed to get medical treatment are suffering from burns and shrapnel and blast injuries, while many are in need of critical care and are under-nourished, MSF officials said.

But there is concern that only a small number of the civilians were getting the medical attention they required.

“Really, (there is) a huge level of human suffering,” Jonathan Henry, MSF emergency coordinator in west Mosul, told reporters in Geneva after spending six weeks in Iraq.

“This is a massive population that has been traumatized from a very brutal and horrific conflict,” he said.

Iraqi commanders have predicted final victory in Mosul this week after a grinding eight-month assault that has pushed Islamic State into a rectangle no more than 300 by 500 meters in the city whose population used to be 2 million.

International charity Save the Children said in a separate report that fighting and years of living under Islamic State have left Mosul’s children with dangerous levels of psychological damage.

Findings from focus group discussions with 65 children in a displacement camp south of Mosul found that children are so deeply scarred by memories of extreme violence they are living in constant fear for their lives, unable to show emotions, and suffering from vivid “waking nightmares”.

Displaced Iraqi civilians who fled from clashes. REUTERS/Stringer

Displaced Iraqi civilians who fled from clashes. REUTERS/Stringer

The loss of loved ones was the biggest cause of distress, with 90 percent reporting the loss of at least one family member through death, separation during their escape, or abduction, the report said.

Children said they had seen family members killed in front of them, dead bodies and blood in the streets, and bombs destroying their homes. Others shared stories of family members shot by snipers, blown up by landmines or hit by explosions as they fled.

The militants’ brutality and the U.S.-backed war to end their three-year rule has created an “extremely traumatic environment for people to flee from and to return to,” affecting their mental health on a large scale, MSF’s Henry said.

“The west (of the city) has been heavily destroyed. It’s really mass destruction … similar to the blitz of the Second World War, hospitals have been destroyed, neighborhoods are in ruins.”

The battles in the Old City’s maze of narrow alleyways is fought house-by-house in streets packed with civilians and planted with multiple explosive devices by the militants, who are also using drones and suicide bombings.

Shrapnel and blast injuries, broken bones from collapsed buildings and burns are the main type of wounds seen by the MSF team of surgeons in west Mosul, Henry said.

Half of the 100 war-wounded over the past two weeks at the MSF 25-bed hospital were women and children in need of critical care and many were malnourished, he said.

“But the most urgent patients we feel are not able to leave the conflict area.”

About 900,000 people have been displaced by the fighting, taking shelter in camps or with relatives and friends, according the aid group.

A tank of the Emergency Response Division fires at Islamic State militant in the old city of Mosul, Iraq July 5, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

A tank of the Emergency Response Division fires at Islamic State militant in the old city of Mosul, Iraq July 5, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Richard Balmforth and Robin Pomeroy)

Arab states to deliver verdict on Qatar as compromise elusive

An aerial view shows Doha's diplomatic area March 21, 2013. REUTERS/Fadi Al-Assaad

By Sami Aboudi

DUBAI (Reuters) – Arab states that have imposed sanctions on Qatar, accusing it of links to terrorism, were due to meet in Cairo on Wednesday to consider Doha’s response to a stiff ultimatum, but settlement of the dispute seemed far off.

The editor of the Abu Dhabi government linked al-Ittihad newspaper wrote in an editorial that Qatar was “walking alone in its dreams and illusions, far away from its Gulf Arab brothers”.

Foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain will consider whether to escalate, or less likely abandon, the boycott imposed on Qatar last month that has rattled a key oil-producing region and unnerved strategic Western allies.

Qatar faces further isolation and possible expulsion from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) if its response to a list of demands made nearly two weeks ago is not deemed satisfactory.

The Arab countries have demanded Qatar curtail its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, shut down the pan-Arab al Jazeera TV channel, close down a Turkish base and downgrade its ties with regional arch-rival Iran.

They view Qatar’s independent diplomatic stances and support for 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings as support for terrorism and a dangerous breaking of ranks – charges Doha vigorously denies.

Qatar has countered that the Arab countries want to curb free speech and take over its foreign policy, saying their 13 demands are so harsh they were made to be rejected.

The gas-rich state had raised its international profile dramatically in recent years, drawing on huge gas revenues, and developed its economy with ambitious infrastructure projects. It is due to host the soccer world cup in 2022.

Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani said at a joint news conference with his German counterpart on Tuesday that its response was “given in goodwill and good initiative for a constructive solution”, but insisted that Doha would not compromise on its sovereignty.

Gulf officials have said the demands are not negotiable, signaling more sanctions are possible, including “parting ways” with Doha – a suggestion it may be ejected from the GCC, a regional economic and security cooperation body founded in 1981.

“A Gulf national may be obliged to prepare psychologically for his Gulf to be without Qatar,” the editor of the Abu Dhabi al-Ittihad newspaper said.

Some newspapers said remarks by Sheikh Mohammed in which he stressed his country would not compromise on its sovereignty suggests that Doha would not change its policies.

Qatari officials have repeatedly said the demands are so draconian that they suspect the four countries never seriously intended to negotiate them, and were instead seeing to hobble Doha’s sovereignty.

At the same time, they have said Qatar is interested in negotiating a fair and just solution to issues they view as a legitimate concern to fellow GCC member states.

(Reporting by Sami Aboudi; Writing By Noah Browning; editing by Ralph Boulton)

Desperate civilians flee last Islamic State pocket in Mosul

Displaced Iraqi people who fled from Islamic State militants stand in line for a security check in Mosul, Iraq July 3, 2017. Picture taken July 3, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

By Stephen Kalin

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Shop-owner Adnan dragged himself from the rubble two days in a row after the houses he was sheltering in were bombed, one after the other, in the U.S.-led campaign to uproot the last Islamic State militants from Mosul.

“Daesh (Islamic State) forced us out of our home, so we moved to a relative’s house nearby. Yesterday the house was bombed,” he said after the army evacuated him on Monday. “We moved to my cousin’s house and this morning it was also bombed.”

Adnan, who has shrapnel lodged in his skull from an earlier mortar attack, said he survived, with others, by hiding in the houses’ underground cellars.

Thousands of people in the last patch of Mosul still controlled by the insurgents have been huddling for weeks in similar conditions, with little food and no electricity. They fear being bombed if they remain in place and being shot by snipers if they try to flee.

Iraqi forces have pushed Islamic State into a shrinking rectangle no more than 300 by 500 meters beside the Tigris river, but slowed their advance on Tuesday out of caution for an estimated 10,000 civilians trapped there alongside the militants.

Residents have been caught in the crossfire – and often intentionally targeted by Islamic State – since the offensive began more than eight months ago. Thousands have been killed and around 900,000 – around half of Mosul’s pre-war population – have been displaced.

Those in the historic Old City, the offensive’s final target, have been besieged and under fire for longer than those in any other part of Mosul, and the toll is apparent.

Children are emerging bone thin and severely dehydrated, elderly people are collapsing en route. In many cases there is nothing to eat besides boiled wheat.

At a mustering point less than a kilometer from the frontline, residents rattled off the latest prices of basic goods which they said had become prohibitively expensive in the past three months: a kilogram of lentils for 60,000 Iraqi dinars ($51), rice for 25,000 and flour for 22,000.

Mohammed Taher, a young man from the Makawi area of the Old City, said Russian-speaking IS fighters spread out across the neighborhood had impeded civilian movement.

“It was a prison,” he said. “Five days ago they locked the door on us. They said, ‘Don’t come out, die inside’. But the army came and freed us.”

A European medic at a field hospital said he has seen more severe trauma cases among civilians fleeing the fighting in the past week than he had in 20 years of service back home.

SCREENING

From the mustering point, camouflaged army trucks carry the evacuees across the Tigris river to a security screening center in the shadow of the Nineveh Oberoi Hotel, a former five-star hotel which Islamic State once used to house foreign fighters and suicide bombers.

More than 4,000 people have passed through that screening center since mid-May, said Lieutenant Colonel Khalid al-Jabouri, who runs the site. In that time, security forces have detained around 400 suspected IS members, he said.

“They are wanted so they cross with the civilians like they are one of them,” he told Reuters. “In order to relieve our country from these pigs, we have to check every person who comes and goes.”

Jabouri pointed out two middle-aged men who intelligence officers had pulled aside from among several dozen others for suspected links to Islamic State. One wore a traditional white robe and black headdress, the other had a shaved head and a bandage on one leg.

“That person is a Daesh member,” he said, pointing at the second man. “He crossed without papers but he is Daesh. He crossed wounded or pretending to be wounded.”

The number of Islamic State militants fighting in Mosul, by far the biggest city it has ever controlled, has dwindled from thousands at the start of the U.S.-backed offensive to a couple of hundred now, according to the Iraqi military.

The security forces rely on a list of names and witness testimonies to identify suspected Islamic State members. Even as the military offensive draws to a close, though, it is clear that some militants have managed to slip through the cracks.

Suspected militants are arrested on a daily basis in Mosul neighborhoods proclaimed “liberated” from Islamic State months ago, and several suicide attacks have already been carried out in those areas.

(Editing by Philippa Fletcher)

U.S.-backed Syrian force battles Islamic State in Raqqa’s Old City

Syrian Democratic Forces fighters inspect a tunnel dug by Islamic State militants inside a house in Raqqa's al-Sanaa industrial neighborhood. REUTERS/Rodi Said

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said its fighters were waging fierce battles with Islamic State militants in the Old City of Raqqa on Tuesday after the U.S.-led coalition opened two small openings in its historic walls.

The SDF’s media office said four of its fighters were killed in fighting in the Old City. The coalition said on Monday the SDF fighters had breached the Old City after the coalition targeted two 25-meter sections of the 2,500-meter wall.

SDF fighters had seized an ancient palace, Qasr al-Banat, in the eastern part of the Old City, the SDF said in a statement.

An official in the SDF media office said Islamic State had heavily mined the old quarters of Raqqa with devices set off by motion sensor. Islamic State fighters were doing most of their fighting at night and not moving much in the daytime.

The coalition said Islamic State fighters were using the wall as a firing position and had planted “mines and improvised explosive devices at several of the breaks in the wall”, forcing it to open the new breaches in the wall.

“SDF fighters would have been channeled through these locations and were extremely vulnerable as they were targeted with vehicle-borne IEDs (car bombs) and indirect fire as well as direct fire from heavy machineguns, rocket-propelled grenades and snipers as they tried to breach the Old City,” it said.

The SDF launched its assault to capture Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria, last month after gradually closing in on the city.

The official in the SDF media office, speaking to Reuters by phone, said the Raqqa assault was going to plan though Islamic State tactics including use of the new type of mine and drones that drop bombs had slowed down operations a little.

(Reporting by Tom Perry; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

Yemen’s cholera death toll rises to 1,500: WHO

FILE PHOTO: Women sit with relatives infected with cholera at a hospital in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, Yemen May 14, 2017. REUTERS/Abduljabbar Zeyad

ADEN (Reuters) – The death toll from a major cholera outbreak in Yemen has risen to 1,500, Nevio Zagaria, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) representative in Yemen, said on Saturday, and appealed for more help to put an end to the epidemic.

Yemen has been devastated by a 27-month war between a Saudi-led coalition and the armed Iran-aligned Houthi group, making it a breeding ground for the disease, which spreads by faeces getting into food or water and thrives in places with poor sanitation.

Speaking at a joint news conference with representatives of the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank, Zagaria said that had been some 246,000 suspected cases in the period to June 30.

The WHO said this week that the outbreak had reached the halfway mark at 218,798 cases as a massive emergency response has begun to curb its spread two months into the epidemic.

Although most of Yemen’s health infrastructure has broken down and health workers have not been paid for more than six months, the WHO is paying “incentives” to doctors, nurses, cleaners and paramedics to staff an emergency cholera network.

With funding help from the World Bank, the WHO is setting up treatment centers with 50-60 beds each, overseen by shifts of about 14 staff working around the clock. The aim is to reach 5,000 beds in total.

(Reporting by Mohammed Mukhashaf, writing by Sami Aboudi; editing by Jason Neely)

Iraqi forces close in on IS redoubt in Mosul after declaring end of caliphate

The ruined Grand al-Nuri Mosque is seen after it was retaken by the Iraqi forces from the Islamic State militants at the Old City in Mosul, Iraq, June 30, 2017. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

By Stephen Kalin

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Iraqi forces attacked Islamic State’s remaining redoubt in Mosul’s Old City on Friday, a day after hailing the end of the insurgents’ self-declared caliphate with the capture of an historic mosque that symbolized their power.

Dozens of civilians, mostly women and children, fled across the frontline toward the troops as bullets whizzed through the air. They were thirsty and tired, and some had been wounded.

Commanders of Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) cautioned that with the mostly non-Iraqi IS militants dug in among thousands of civilians and likely to fight to the death, the battle ahead remained challenging.

CTS Major General Maan al-Saadi told Reuters it could take at least four to five days of fighting to capture the last handful of neighborhoods along the banks of the Tigris River, defended by about 200 militants.

“The advance continues to Midan neighborhood,” he said. “Controlling it means we have reached the Tigris River.”

The IS militants themselves denied the setbacks. The group, whose leader declared a caliphate over parts of Iraq and Syria three years ago, still occupies an area the size of Belgium across the two neighboring countries, according to one estimate.

The fall of Mosul would mark the effective end of the Iraqi half of the caliphate, although the group still controls territory west and south of the city, ruling over tens of thousands of people.

Its stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, is also under siege. U.S.-backed forces encircled the city after closing the militants’ last way out from the south, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said. Islamic State forces launched a counter-attack on Friday..

DESPERATE CIVILIANS

The insurgent position in Mosul is several hundred meters wide and thousands of civilians are trapped there in harrowing conditions, with little food, water, medicine and no access to health services, according to those who managed to flee.

Those who escaped on Friday streamed through alleyways near the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, which Islamic State fighters blew up a week ago.

They scrambled over mounds of rubble in the street, carrying small children and helping the elderly across.

A Reuters correspondent saw smoke billowing over the riverside districts amid artillery blasts and burst of gunfire. Western troops from the U.S.-led coalition were helping with aerial surveillance and mortar fire, he said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Hailer al-Abadi declared the end of Islamic State’s caliphate — which he called “a state of falsehoood” — on Thursday after CTS units captured the ground of the ruined 850-year-old mosque.

It was from the mosque’s pulpit that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate three years ago to the day.

The insurgents chose to blow it up rather than see their black flag taken down from its al-Hadba, or Hunchback, leaning minaret where it had been flying since June 2014.

The suffering of tens of thousands whose lives have been wrecked for having lost relatives, their homes or their businesses dampened feelings of victory.

“I hear victory speeches on the radio but I cannot help feeling sad when you see people without homes and others fleeing with their children under the blazing sun,” said Mahmoud, a taxi driver in the eastern side of Mosul which was taken back from the militants in the first 100 days of the campaign.

GRINDING WARFARE

The symbolic victory of the Iraqi forces came after more than eight months of grinding urban warfare which has displaced 900,000 people, about half the city’s pre-war population, and killed thousands of civilians, according to aid organizations.

Islamic State’s weekly publication al-Nabaa, denying they were losing the battle for Mosul, said the Iraqi army had virtually collapsed and suffered 300 killed and wounded.

“The epic battle of Mosul is one of the most important battles of Islam and its lessons will be applied in other confrontations, God willing,” read a headline.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support to the offensive, which army and federal police units are also taking part in, attacking from different directions.

“Tight alleyways with booby traps, civilians and ISIS fighters around every corner make the Iraqi security force’s advance extremely challenging,” coalition spokesman U.S. Army Colonel Ryan Dillon said.

Baghdadi’s speech from the Grand al-Nuri Mosque on July 4, 2014 was the first and only time he has revealed himself to the world.

He has left the fighting in Mosul to local commanders and is believed to be hiding on the Iraq-Syrian border, according to U.S. and Iraqi military sources.

The group has moved its remaining command and control structures to Mayadin, in eastern Syria, U.S. intelligence sources said last week, without indicating if Baghdadi was also hiding in the same area.

The secretive Islamic State leader has frequently been reported killed or wounded. Russia said on June 17 its forces might have killed him in an air strike in Syria. But Washington says it has no information to corroborate such reports and Iraqi officials have also been skeptical.

Graphic of Battle for Mosul http://tmsnrt.rs/2rEoDr4

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Richard Balmforth)

New conflicts threaten Syria after Islamic State defeat

Sheen Ibrahim, Kurdish fighter from the People's Protection Units (YPG) walks in Raqqa, Syria June 16, 2017. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

By Michael Georgy and John Walcott

RAQQA, Syria/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sheen Ibrahim’s track record fighting ultra-hardline militants explains U.S. President Donald Trump’s policy of arming Syrian Kurds like her as he seeks to eradicate Islamic State. It also highlights the risks.

Taught by her brother to fire an AK-47 at 15 and encouraged by her mother to fight for Syrian Kurdish autonomy, she says she has killed 50 people since she took up arms in Syria’s six-year-old civil war, fighting first al Qaeda, then crossing into Iraq to help Kurds there against Islamic State.

Now 26, she leads a 15-woman unit hunting down the hardline group in its global headquarters Raqqa, speeding through streets once controlled by the militants in a pick-up truck as fellow fighters comb through ruined buildings for booby traps.

The U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), spearheaded by the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, have taken several parts of the northern Syrian town since their assault began this month.

This week U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis said Washington may arm the SDF for future battles against Islamic State while taking back weapons it no longer needs.

The plan is the “headline” of a still-unfinished stabilization plan for Syria by the Trump administration, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The risk is that it causes new instability in a war in which outside powers are playing ever larger roles.

The U.S.-YPG relationship has infuriated Syria’s northern neighbor Turkey, a NATO ally which says the YPG is an extension of the Kurdish Workers Party, or PKK, designated terrorist by both Ankara and Washington for its insurgency against the Turkish state.

Turkey has sent troops into Syria, partly to attack Islamic State, but also to keep the YPG, which controls Kurdish-populated areas of northern Syria, from moving into an Arab and Turkmen area that would give it control of the whole frontier.

On Wednesday Ankara said its artillery had destroyed YPG targets after local Turkish-backed forces came under attack.

Turkey has recently sent reinforcements into Syria, according to the rebel groups it backs, prompting SDF concern it plans to attack Kurdish YPG forces. The SDF warned on Thursday of a “big possibility of open, fierce confrontation”.

“WE’LL DO WHAT WE CAN”

Syrian Kurdish leaders say they want autonomy in Syria, like that enjoyed by Kurds in Iraq, rather than independence or to interfere in neighboring states. They say Turkish warnings that YPG weapons could end up in PKK hands are unjustified.

“We were the victims of the nation state model and we have no desire to reproduce this model,” said Khaled Eissa, European representative of the PYD, the YPG’s political affiliate.

Ibrahim and other fighters interviewed by Reuters said they were not terrorists but would “stand up” to Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. “Turkey is fighting us,” Ibrahim said. “Anyone who fights us, we will fight.”

Washington is working to calm tensions over its relationship with the YPG, which is also backed by Russia. “There is absolute transparency between Turkey and the United States on that subject,” said Major General Rupert Jones, the British deputy commander of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State.

But disarmament will not be easy, judging by the comments of YPG fighters on the ground. “We will not give up our weapons,” said a sniper aiming at Islamic State positions, who only gave her first name, Barkaneurin. “We need them to defend ourselves.”

Fellow fighter Maryam Mohamed agreed. “Erdogan is our biggest enemy, we cannot hand over our weapons,” she said.

One of the U.S. officials said Washington did not know exactly how many weapons the YPG has because some Arabs had joined its ranks, taking U.S.-supplied weapons with them, when their groups suffered setbacks on the battlefield.

“Loyalties are as variable as the battle lines and sometimes follow them,” the official said.

Asked about weapons recovery, Mattis, in his first public remarks on the issue, said: “We’ll do what we can,” while YPG spokesman Nouri Mahmoud emphasized the target was Islamic State. “We are fighting a global terrorist group,” he said.

Battlefield victory is tantalizingly close. U.S.-backed forces in neighboring Iraq announced on Thursday they had retaken Mosul, Islamic State’s largest stronghold and the twin capital, with Raqqa, of the “caliphate” it declared in 2014.

But the U.S. official and two others who also declined to be named, noted other huge obstacles to stabilizing Syria they said the administration was papering over.

Rebuilding Raqqa will need billions of dollars and an unprecedented level of compromise among groups long hostile to each other, all three officials said. One said Iranian forces backing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were poised to exploit any setbacks.

Kurds are spearheading the attack on Raqqa, but a mainly Arab force is planned to maintain security in the overwhelmingly Arab town thereafter.

While Kurds and Arabs fight side by side against Islamic State, with the militants’ self-proclaimed caliphate shrinking, competition for territory will intensify.

“We are getting ourselves into the middle of another potential mess we don’t understand,” one of the U.S. officials said.

(Additional reporting by John Irish in PARIS, Dominic Evans in ANKARA and Tom Perry in BEIRUT; editing by Philippa Fletcher)

Civilians flee as Iraqi forces attack last Islamic State redoubt in Mosul

Armoured fighting vehicles of the Counter Terrorism Service maneuver at the positions of the Iraqi forces near the Grand al-Nuri Mosque at the Old City in Mosul, Iraq June 29, 2017. REUTERS/Erik De Castro

By Stephen Kalin

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi government forces attacked Islamic State’s remaining redoubt in Mosul’s Old City on Friday, a day after formally declaring the end of the insurgents’ self-declared caliphate and the capture of the historic mosque which symbolized their power.

Dozens of civilians fled in the direction of the Iraqi forces, mostly women and children, some wounded by insurgents fire, thirsty and tired.

The battles ahead will be difficult as most of the militants are foreigners expected to fight until the death. They are dug in among civilians, using them as human shields, Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) commanders in the city told Reuters.

CTS Major General Maan al-Saadi said it could take four to five days of fighting to capture the insurgents’ redoubt by the Tigris River, defended by about 200 fighters,

“The advance continues to Midan neighborhood,” he said. “Controlling it means we have reached the Tigris River.”

The insurgent position is several hundred meters wide and tens of thousands of civilians are trapped there in harrowing conditions, with little food, water, medicine and no access to health services, according to those who managed to flee.

Those who escaped on Friday streamed through alleyways near the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, which Islamic State fighters blew up a week ago.

Plumes of smoke billowed over the riverside districts amid artillery blasts and burst of gunfire. Western troops from the U.S.-led coalition were helping adjust artillery fire with air surveillance, he said.

Iraqi Prime Minister Hailer al-Abadi declared the end of Islamic States’ caliphate — which he called “a state of falsehoood”‘ — on Thursday after CTS captured the ground of the ruined 850-year-old mosque.

It was from the mosque’s pulpit that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his caliphate over parts of Syria and Iraq almost three years ago to the day.

The insurgents chose to blow it up rather than see their black flag taken down from its al-Hadba, or Hunchback, minaret where it had been flying since June 2014.

GRINDING WARFARE

The symbolic victory of the Iraqi forces was won after more than eight months of grinding urban warfare which displaced 900,000 people, about half the city’s pre-war population, and killed thousands of civilians, according to aid organizations.

A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support to the offensive, which army and federal police units are also taking part in, attacking from different directions.

The fall of Mosul would in effect mark the end of the Iraqi half of the IS caliphate, although the group still controls territory west and south of the city, ruling over hundreds of thousands of people. Its stronghold in Syria, Raqqa, is also under siege..

The group continues to occupy an area as big as Belgium across Iraq and Syria, according to IHS Markit, an analytics firm.

Al-Baghdadi’s speech from the Grand al-Nuri Mosque on July 4, 2014, was the first and only time he has revealed himself to the world.

He has left the fighting in Mosul to local commanders and is believed to be hiding in the border area between Iraq and Syria, according to U.S. and Iraqi military sources.

The group has moved its remaining command and control structures to Mayadin, in eastern Syria, U.S. intelligence sources said last week, without indicating if Baghdadi was also hiding in the same area.

The secretive Islamic State leader has frequently been

reported killed or wounded. Russia said on June 17 its forces might have killed him in an air strike in Syria. But Washington says it has no information to corroborate such reports and Iraqi officials have also been skeptical.

Graphic of Battle for Mosul http://tmsnrt.rs/2rEoDr4

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Angus MacSwan)