Tag Archives: Middle East

U.S.-backed Syria militias say Tabqa, dam captured from Islamic State

FILE PHOTO: A view shows Tabqa City as seen from the northern part of the Tabqa Dam on the Euphrates River, Syria March 28, 2017. REUTERS/Rodi Said/File Photo

By Ellen Francis

BEIRUT (Reuters) – U.S.-backed Syrian militias said they fully seized the town of Tabqa and Syria’s largest dam from Islamic State on Wednesday, a major objective as they prepare to launch an assault on Raqqa, the jihadists’ biggest urban stronghold.

The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, have been battling the militant group for weeks in Tabqa, some 40 km (25 miles) west of Raqqa, along the Euphrates River.

With air strikes and special forces from the U.S.-led coalition, the SDF are advancing on Raqqa to ultimately take the city, which is also the Islamic State’s base of operations in Syria.

They captured Tabqa “thanks to the sacrifices of the SDF’s heroes and with the full, unlimited support of the U.S.-led international coalition”, said SDF spokesman Talal Silo.

Nasser Haj Mansour, an adviser to the SDF, said the town and the adjacent Tabqa dam were now “completely liberated” after the SDF drove all Islamic State militants out.

Brett McGurk, the U.S.’ special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter Islamic State, confirmed on Twitter that Tabqa had been retaken.

“Confirmed: #ISIS defeated in #Tabqa Dam and Tabqa City, now in hands of Syrian Democratic Forces, led by its Syrian Arab Coalition. #SDF”, McGurk tweeted.

The Raqqa campaign appeared to have stalled around Tabqa, where the SDF made only slow progress after besieging the city. They pushed into Tabqa nearly two weeks ago, capturing most of its districts and encircling Islamic State at the dam.

The battle for Tabqa began after U.S. forces helped SDF fighters conduct an airborne landing on the southern bank of the Euphrates in late March, allowing them to gain control of an important nearby airbase.

Despite fierce objections from NATO ally Turkey, the United States this week approved supplying arms to the powerful Kurdish YPG militia, a key component of the SDF and their campaign.

Ankara strongly opposes U.S. support of the YPG, viewing it as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a three-decade insurgency within Turkey.

But the YPG has emerged as a valuable partner for the United States in the fight against Islamic State in northern Syria. Washington maintains arming the Syrian Kurdish forces is necessary to capture Raqqa, which Islamic State has also used a hub for planning attacks abroad.

Raqqa now lies in an Islamic State enclave on the northern bank of the Euphrates, after the SDF has closed in on the city from the north, east and west in recent months.

Islamic State’s only means of crossing to its main territory south of the river is by boat after air strikes knocked the area’s bridges out of service.

The jihadist group still controls swathes of Syria’s vast eastern deserts and most of Deir al-Zor province near the border with Iraq, but it has lost tracts of its territory over the past year.

(Reporting by Ellen Francis, additional reporting by Idrees Ali; editing by Robin Pomeroy, Alison Williams and G Crosse)

U.N. has ‘a million questions’ on Syria after Astana deal

United Nations Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura attends a news conference at the European headquarters of the U.N. in Geneva, Switzerland May 11 2017. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United Nations still has a million questions about a Syria deal struck last week by Russia, Turkey and Iran, with aid convoys almost totally stalled despite a reported reduction in the fighting, a U.N. aid official said on Thursday.

“Russia and Turkey and Iran explained to us today and yesterday … that they will work very openly, proactively, with United Nations and humanitarian partners to implement this agreement,” U.N. Syria humanitarian adviser Jan Egeland told reporters.

“We do have a million questions and concerns but I think we don’t have the luxury that some have, of this distant cynicism, and saying it will fail. We need this to succeed.”

The three-country deal on de-escalation zones was signed last week in the Kazakh capital Astana, with a goal of resolving operational issues, such as how to police the zones, within two weeks and of mapping them out by June 4.

U.N. Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said he was convening what he called “rather business-like, rather short” peace talks in Geneva from May 16-19 to take advantage of the momentum. The political weight of the signatories and the staggered timing of the deal gave it a strong chance of working.

The alternative would be “another 10 Aleppos”, he said, referring to Syria’s second city which fell to forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in December after years of fighting.

A key aspect of the Astana deal was that it was an “interim” arrangement to address urgent issues, not a permanent partition of Syria, he said.

De Mistura said the Astana talks had also made rapid progress on agreements covering prisoner releases and de-mining, and both were almost complete.

Egeland said he could point to one concrete result from Astana: the reported reduction in fighting and aerial attacks. But aid convoys were only being allowed in at the rate of one per week, with no permission letters coming from the government.

Although some recent local surrenders meant the number of people who were hard to reach with aid had fallen by 10 percent to 4.5 million, a further 625,000 were besieged – 80 percent of them by forces loyal to Assad, he said.

(Reporting by Tom Miles and Stephanie Nebehay)

Leading Hamas official says no softened stance toward Israel

FILE PHOTO: Veteran Hamas strategist Mahmoud Al-Zahar gestures during an interview with Reuters at his house in Gaza City April 29, 2014. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) – One of Hamas’s most senior officials said on Wednesday a document published by the Islamist Palestinian group last week was not a substitute for its founding charter, which advocates Israel’s destruction.

Speaking in Gaza City, Mahmoud al-Zahar, a regular critic of Israel, said the political policy document announced in Qatar on May 1 by Hamas’s outgoing chief Khaled Meshaal did not contradict its founding covenant, published in 1988.

Trailed for weeks by Hamas officials, the document appeared to be an attempt to soften the group’s language toward Israel. But it still called for “the liberation of all of historical Palestine”, said armed resistance was a means to achieve that goal, and did not recognize Israel’s right to exist.

“The pledge Hamas made before God was to liberate all of Palestine,” Zahar said on Wednesday. “The charter is the core of (Hamas’s) position and the mechanism of this position is the document.”

Many Western countries classify Hamas as a terrorist group over its failure to renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.

In its new document, Hamas said it agrees to a transitional Palestinian state within frontiers pre-dating the 1967 Middle East war but continues to oppose recognizing Israel’s right to exist and backs an armed struggle.

Western-backed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the rival Fatah movement that controls the Israeli-occupied West Bank, recognizes Israel and seeks a final peace agreement based on those lines.

U.S. President Donald Trump will meet Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the region later this month, and a summit to restart peace talks stalled since 2014 has been mentioned in media reports.

Zahar denied that Hamas was trying to align itself with Fatah’s position.

“When people say that Hamas has accepted the 1967 borders, like others, it is an offense to us,” he said.

“We have reaffirmed the unchanging constant principles that we do not recognize Israel; we do not recognize the land occupied in 1948 as belonging to Israel and we do not recognize that the people who came here (Jews) own this land.

“Therefore, there is no contradiction between what we said in the document and the pledge we have made to God in our (original) charter,” Zahar added.

On Sunday, Netanyahu symbolically tossed Hamas’s “hateful document” into a waste paper bin and said the group was trying to fool the world.

(Editing by Ori Lewis and Catherine Evans)

U.S. decision to arm Syrian Kurds threatens Turkey: foreign minister

FILE PHOTO: Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG) head a convoy of U.S military vehicles in the town of Darbasiya next to the Turkish border, Syria April 28, 2017. REUTERS/Rodi Said/File Photo

By Tulay Karadeniz and Tuvan Gumrukcu

ANKARA (Reuters) – Turkey urged the United States on Wednesday to reverse a decision to arm Kurdish forces fighting Islamic State (IS) in Syria, saying every weapon supplied to the YPG militia constituted “a threat to Turkey”.

The angry reply came a week before President Tayyip Erdogan is due in Washington for his first meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, who approved the arms supply to support a campaign to retake the Syrian city of Raqqa from Islamic State.

Turkey views the YPG as the Syrian extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has fought an insurgency in southeast Turkey since 1984 and is considered a terrorist group by the United States, Turkey and Europe.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, speaking while on a visit to Montenegro, said weapons supplied to the YPG had in the past fallen into PKK hands.

“Both the PKK and YPG are terrorist organizations and they are no different apart from their names,” he told a televised news conference. “Every weapon seized by them is a threat to Turkey.”

The United States sees the YPG as a valuable partner in the fight against Islamic State militants in northern Syria, and says that arming the Kurdish forces is necessary to retaking the city of Raqqa, Islamic State’s de facto capital in Syria and a hub for planning attacks against the West.

The YPG said Washington’s decision would bring swift results and help the militia “play a stronger, more influential and more decisive role in combating terrorism”.

The Pentagon said on Tuesday it was aware of concerns in Turkey, a NATO ally that has given vital support to a U.S.-led campaign against IS in Syria and Iraq. Jets carrying out air strikes against IS have flown from Turkey’s Incirlik air base.

Erdogan has not yet responded to Trump’s decision, but has repeatedly castigated Washington for its support of the YPG.

Deputy Prime Minister Nurettin Canikli said the United States should review its decision. “We hope the U.S. administration will put a stop to this wrong and turn back from it,” he said in an interview with Turkish broadcaster A Haber.

“Such a policy will not be beneficial, you can’t be in the same sack as terrorist organizations.”

LIMITED OPTIONS

Ankara has argued that Washington should switch support for the Raqqa assault from the YPG to Syrian rebels Turkey has trained and led against Islamic State for the past year – despite Washington’s scepticism about their military capability.

“There is no reality in the comments that a ground operation against Daesh (Islamic State) can only be successful with the YPG. I hope they turn back from this mistake,” Canikli said.

Despite the angry language, Erdogan’s government has little chance of reversing Washington’s decision, and any retaliatory move would come at a cost.

Cavusoglu said Trump would discuss the issue with Trump during his planned May 16-17 visit to Washington, suggesting there were no plans to call off the talks in protest.

“Turkey doesn’t have much room to move here,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat and analyst at Carnegie Europe. “I think Washington made such an evaluation when taking this decision.”

While Turkey could impose limits on the use of the Incirlik base, that would hamper operations against Islamic State, which also menaces Turkey itself and has claimed responsibility for attacks including the bombing of Istanbul airport.

Turkey could also step up air strikes on PKK targets in northern Iraq. Turkish warplanes attacked Kurdish YPG fighters in northeastern Syria and Iraq’s Sinjar region late last month.

But Cavusoglu and Canikli both pointed to a diplomatic, rather than military, response to Trump’s decision.

“We are carrying out, and will carry out, all necessary diplomatic communications,” Canikli said. “Our wish is that the U.S. stops this wrong and does what is mandated by our friendship.”

(Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Daren Butler in Istanbul; editing by Dominic Evans and Mark Heinrich)

Palestinian hunger strike heightens tension with Israel

Palestinians take part in a protest in support of Palestinian prisoners on hunger strike in Israeli jails, in Gaza City May 9, 2017. REUTERS/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa

By Luke Baker and Nidal al-Mughrabi

JERUSALEM/GAZA (Reuters) – A hunger strike by more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners over their treatment in Israeli jails has turned into a heated dispute over whether the leader of the protest secretly broke the fast, and whether Israel tempted him to do so.

The strike, which began on April 17, followed a call by Marwan Barghouti, the most high-profile Palestinian in Israeli detention, for a protest against poor conditions and an Israeli policy of detention without trial that has applied to thousands of prisoners since the 1980s.

Barghouti, a leader of the Fatah movement, has seen his popularity grow among Palestinians since he was convicted of murder over the killing of Israelis during the second intifada and sentenced in 2004 to five life terms. Surveys show many Palestinians want him to be their next president.

While hunger strikes are not uncommon among the 6,500 Palestinians in Israeli jails, many of whom were convicted of attacks or planning attacks against Israel, this is one of the largest yet. If sustained it could present a challenge to Israel ahead of a visit by U.S. President Donald Trump on May 22.

It is also likely to raise tensions between Israel and the Palestinians as the 50th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem approaches in early June.

At the start of the strike, a group of Israeli settlers held a barbecue in the parking lot of one of the prisons, an apparent effort to taunt those inside who were not eating.

On Sunday, Israel’s public security minister, who says the strike is politically motivated, accused Barghouti of secretly consuming cookies and chocolate bars, and the government released footage from the Israel Prison Service.

“He lied to the Palestinian public when he claimed to be striking,” said Gilad Erdan. “Israel will not give in to extortion and pressure from terrorists.”

FORCE FEEDING

The footage, two videos shot days apart from a camera mounted on the ceiling of the cell, do not conclusively show that the prisoner is Barghouti, 58, and it is not entirely clear what he is eating or whether he is doing so.

On Monday, following questions about how the video came to light, Erdan suggested Israeli prison guards had tempted Barghouti with the food. Since he is held in solitary confinement, he would not have been able to smuggle it in.

“You’ve got to understand, without me going into detail, that in order to lead him to this situation, a great many actions were taken,” Erdan told Army Radio. “They got results.”

Barghouti’s wife, Fadwa, has denounced the video, saying it is an effort to discredit her husband, and suggested the footage may well have been taken in 2004.

“It was not surprising what the occupation did and the fabrications they have tried to spread,” she told Reuters. “Such an act has unveiled the ugly face of the Israeli occupation.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said the health of the strikers was deteriorating and Israel needed to act.

“I am afraid some unfortunate things could happen to those prisoners which may complicate things further, therefore, I urge the Israeli government to accept their humanitarian demands,” he said during a news conference in Ramallah.

Fadwa and other wives and relatives have had no access to the hunger strikers, a situation the International Committee for the Red Cross, the United Nations and other organizations are trying to resolve with Israel.

She said ICRC officials told her the Israeli prison authority had prevented them from seeing her husband.

Suhair Zakout, a spokeswoman for the ICRC in Gaza, said the group had visited most of the prisoners taking part in the strike to check on their health and ensure Israel does not try to force them to eat.

Israel has resorted to force-feeding in the past, even though Israel’s Medical Association opposes the policy as a form of torture. It has urged Israeli doctors not to carry it out.

(Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Qatar says Syria ‘de-escalation’ plan not an alternative to political transition

Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani attends a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, in this file photo dated April 15, 2017. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

DOHA (Reuters) – Qatar’s foreign minister on Tuesday welcomed a Russian-brokered agreement for “de-escalation” zones in Syria but said the plan was no substitute for a political transition that would see President Bashar al-Assad step down.

Qatar has been a supporter of rebels who have been fighting to overthrow the Syrian president during six years of civil war.

“It is good to have de-escalation zones but this must be a step to reach a solution to the Syrian crisis and not to use it as an excuse to delay this solution and to postpone the political transition,” the Qatari foreign ministry quoted Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman al-Thani as telling the Doha-based al-Jazeera network.

The remarks came after talks between the Qatari minister and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in Washington.

Russia brokered the deal for de-escalation zones with backing from Iran and opposition supporter Turkey during ceasefire talks in the Kazakh capital Astana last week. The deal took effect at midnight on Friday.

Some fighting has continued in those areas, particularly north of Hama city, but the overall intensity has reduced, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said.

(Reporting by Tom Finn, writing by Sami Aboudi, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Civilians complicate final phase of Mosul campaign: U.S. commander

Smoke is seen as members of the Iraqi forces clash with Islamic State fighters on a frontline in north west of Mosul, Iraq, May 8, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

By Ahmed Aboulenein

SOUTHWEST OF MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – The Islamic State fighters herded a group of civilians into a house in the city of Mosul and locked them inside as Iraqi forces advanced. Moments later, the militants entered through a window, lay low for a few minutes, then fired their weapons.

The plan was simple. They would draw attention to the house by firing from the windows, then move to an adjacent building through a hole in the wall, in hope of goading coalition jets flying above to strike the house.

What the militants did not realize was that U.S. advisers partnered with Iraqi troops were watching the whole thing on an aerial drone feed. No air strike was called – and the propaganda coup Islamic State would have reaped from the deaths of innocent people was averted.

“We automatically knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to bait us into destroying this building,” said U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel James Browning. “This is the game that we play, this is the challenge that we go through every day.”

The challenge is only increasing as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces squeeze the militants into a smaller and smaller area of Mosul, where they are now trapped along with several hundred thousand civilians.

“There is nowhere to go…. the battlefield is much more complicated with the amount of civilians that are moving,” Browning said.

The risks are high: more than 100 civilians were accidentally killed in a single airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition in March.

FINAL PHASE

After opening up a new front in northwest Mosul last week in order to stretch the militants’ defenses, Iraqi forces say the battle for Mosul is now in its final phase.

U.S. servicemen are visible near the frontlines advising the Iraqis as they advance into the last handful of districts controlled by Islamic State, facing a barrage of suicide car bombs and sniper fire.

Browning, a battalion commander from the 82nd Airborne Division, is one of more than 5,000 U.S. service members currently deployed in Iraq to “advise and assist” security forces that collapsed when Islamic State overran Mosul nearly three summers ago.

It is a much smaller footprint than the 170,000 troops deployed at the height of the nine-year occupation that followed the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, during which more than 4,000 American soldiers were killed.

Having extricated U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, the White House is loath to re-enter a costly conflict that would prove unpopular with the public.

For Browning, who was deployed to Iraq in 2008, the nature of the U.S. role is clearly different.

“Whereas before it was me leading fights and I would ask my Iraqi partners to come with me, now… he leads the fight and I follow him,” he said. “The biggest difference is that we are no longer in a combat role.”

Since the Mosul offensive began last October, the U.S. role has evolved so that American forces are now partnered with Iraqi troops at a lower level, reducing the time it takes them to respond to Islamic State.

That means company commanders under Browning are also partnered with brigade commanders who report to his Iraqi opposite number, Lieutenant General Qassem al-Maliki.

They hold daily discussions on operations and determine what U.S. forces can do to help, which may involve providing imagery, intelligence, air strikes, or ground fire.

The Iraqis also provide human intelligence that the U.S. forces will corroborate in order to identify targets and determine the best approach to attacking them.

Browning lives on the same base as Maliki, commander of the Iraqi 9th division, making it easier to finetune battle plans.

“Everything I am trying to do is try to shape the battlefield for him”.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Isabel Coles and Mark Trevelyan)

Netanyahu tosses Hamas policy paper on Israel into waste bin

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chairs a weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem May 7, 2017. REUTERS/Oded Balilty/Pool

By Ori Lewis

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday symbolically tossed into a bin a Hamas policy paper published last week that set out an apparent softening of the Palestinian Islamist group’s stance toward Israel.

In a document issued last Monday, Hamas said it was dropping its longstanding call for Israel’s destruction, but said it still rejected the Jewish state’s right to exist and continued to back “armed struggle” against it.

The Israeli government has said the document aimed to deceive the world that Hamas was becoming more moderate.

Netanyahu, in a 97-second video clip aired on social media on Sunday, said that news outlets had been taken in by “fake news”. Sitting behind his desk with tense music playing in the background, he said that in its “hateful document”, Hamas “lies to the world”. He then pulled up a waste paper bin, crumpled the document into a ball and tossed it away.

“The new Hamas document says that Israel has no right to exist, it says every inch of our land belongs to the Palestinians, it says there is no acceptable solution other than to remove Israel… they want to use their state to destroy our state,” Netanyahu said.

Founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned Egyptian Islamist movement, Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2007 and has carried out hundreds of armed attacks in Israel and in Israeli-occupied territories.

Many Western countries classify Hamas as a terrorist group over its failure to renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist and accept existing interim Israeli-Palestinian peace agreements.

Outgoing Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal said Hamas’s fight was not against Judaism as a religion but against what he called “aggressor Zionists”. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, was named on Saturday to succeed Meshaal.

Netanyahu concluded his clip by saying that “Hamas murders women and children, it’s launched tens of thousands of missiles at our homes, it brainwashes Palestinian kids in suicide kindergarten camps,” before binning the document.

(Writing by Ori Lewis; Editing by Susan Fenton)

If London were Aleppo – Buckingham Palace destroyed, 4.3 million dead or displaced

People view sunrise in London, Britain, January 13, 2017. REUTERS/Toby Melville

BERLIN (Reuters) – The bullet-riddled, bombed-out buildings of Aleppo may bear little resemblance to London’s gleaming skyscrapers but the two cities once had much in common, something German artist Hans Hack has seized on to bring home the reality of war.

Before Syria’s six-year civil war, Aleppo — like London — was its country’s biggest city, as well as a key commercial hub. But, unlike teeming London, half of Aleppo is now effectively a ghost town.

To bring the suffering home to those in Europe, data visualizer Hack has used United Nations satellite data of Aleppo’s destruction and created equivalent maps of London and Berlin.

“For me it’s hard to understand in the news what it means, how strongly Aleppo was destroyed. I wanted to take this information and project it onto something I know personally that I can have some reference to. So I chose Berlin and London,” hack told Reuters.

London suffered the same damage as Aleppo, entire neighborhoods would be wiped off the map — in this alternative reality, Buckingham Palace, the Olympic stadium and the tower of London are all rubble.

It’s an echo of what happened in Aleppo. When the Syrian army captured the city from rebels in December 2016, the area was in ruins.

What the map doesn’t show are the human casualties. Since Syria’s civil war began the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that Aleppo’s population fell from 2 million to 1.3 million just after people started returning to the city.

A drop of similar proportions in London would see about 4.3 million people killed or displaced.

Feras al-Shehabi, chairman of the Aleppo Chamber of Industry, told Reuters in February that his city’s situation was “very similar to Berlin in 1946 or Tokyo in 1946. So you have a destroyed city.”

Still, Hack is reluctant to compare modern-day Aleppo with the cities ravaged in World War Two.

“I’m reluctant to draw parallels with history because I don’t think you can directly compare the way people have suffered. But I can imagine those who remember what it was like then (World War Two) don’t need a map like this,” he said.

(Reporting by Sreerk Heinz, writing by Rosanna Philpott in London Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)

Flooding forces Mosul residents to flee war in rickety boats

Displaced Iraqis cross the Tigris River by boat after the bridge has been temporarily closed, in western Mosul, Iraq May 6, 2017. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Ahmed Aboulenein

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – The Iraqi man laid the body of his wife, wrapped in a black shroud, gently on the bow of a small wooden boat and held onto it as a second man rowed slowly to pick up the man’s three children standing a few meters away.

The two teenage girls and young boy climbed in, careful not to disturb the balance, for the crossing taking their mother, killed in an air strike this week, to the east bank of the Tigris River.

This crossing is no ancient rite, however.

It is an extra hardship heaped on the family by the flooding of the Tigris and the disassembly of the last pontoon bridge linking the two sides of Mosul, where U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have been fighting to oust the Islamic State militants who seized the city in 2014.

Loading up everything from clothes and food to injured or dead relatives, hundreds of families exhausted by war have been crossing the river on small, rickety fishing boats capable of holding only five or six people.

Many have been leaving the Musherfa district of western Mosul after U.S.-backed Iraqi forces took it from Islamic State on Friday, hoping to reach the relative safety of the eastern banks of the river.

“We suffered Islamic State’s injustice, and now that we are free we were promised five bridges,” said 45-year-old Mushref Mohamed, an ice factory worker from Musherfa. “Where are the bridges? We have been waiting for two days.”

“So many of my neighbors and friends died. We were freed, but we are not happy because we lost the people closest to us.”

The flooding has cut off all crossing points between east and west and forced the military to dismantle the makeshift bridges linking the two sides of Iraq’s second-largest city.

DESTROYED BRIDGES

Mothers carrying babies, men in wheelchairs, and families of up to 15 people have been paying 1,000 Iraqi dinars ($0.86) per head to make the short journey, with many needing to make two or three trips.

Even soldiers carrying green army crates full of military documents and cigarettes have had to use the boats. The army initially planned to transport people using steamboats when they took down the pontoons, but now say they have run out of gas.

“We came from the early morning at 7am and have been waiting until now. It is noon. The steamboats do not have gas. This government cannot provide gas?” asked Mohsen, a pensioner from the Wadi Hajar area in west Mosul.

Mosul’s permanent bridges have mostly been destroyed during the seven-month campaign to take the city back from Islamic State.

The army opened a new front in the war with an armored division trying to advance into the city from the north on Thursday and taking back two areas on Friday.

The militants are now besieged in the northwestern corner of Mosul which includes the historic Old City, the medieval Grand al-Nuri Mosque and its landmark leaning minaret where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a “caliphate” spanning swathes of Syria and Iraq in June 2014.

The Iraqi army said on April 30 that it aimed to complete the retaking of Mosul, the largest city to have fallen under Islamic State control in both Iraq and Syria, this month.

(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Editing by Hugh Lawson)