Tag Archives: Mosul

How Iran closed the Mosul ‘horseshoe’ and changed Iraq war

Iraqi army members ride in a military vehicle in Bartila, Iraq

By Dominic Evans, Maher Chmaytelli and Patrick Markey

BAGHDAD/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – In the early days of the assault on Islamic State in Mosul, Iran successfully pressed Iraq to change its battle plan and seal off the city, an intervention which has since shaped the tortuous course of the conflict, sources briefed on the plan say.

The original campaign strategy called for Iraqi forces to close in around Mosul in a horseshoe formation, blocking three fronts but leaving open the fourth – to the west of the city leading to Islamic State territory in neighboring Syria.

That model, used to recapture several Iraqi cities from the ultra-hardline militants in the last two years, would have left fighters and civilians a clear route of escape and could have made the Mosul battle quicker and simpler.

But Tehran, anxious that retreating fighters would sweep back into Syria just as Iran’s ally President Bashar al-Assad was gaining the upper hand in his country’s five-year civil war, wanted Islamic State crushed and eliminated in Mosul.

Displaced Iraqis, fleeing villages under Islamic State control, sit in a van as security forces backed by tribal militias battle to retake area on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, Iraq

Displaced Iraqis, fleeing villages under Islamic State control, sit in a van as security forces backed by tribal militias battle to retake area on the eastern bank of the river Tigris, Iraq December 7, 2016. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

The sources say Iran lobbied for Iranian-backed Popular Mobilization fighters to be sent to the western front to seal off the link between Mosul and Raqqa, the two main cities of Islamic State’s self-declared cross-border caliphate.

That link is now broken. For the first time in Iraq’s two-and-half-year, Western-backed drive to defeat Islamic State, several thousand militants have little choice but to fight to the death, and 1 million remaining Mosul citizens have no escape from the front lines creeping ever closer to the city center.

“If you corner your enemy and don’t leave an escape, he will fight till the end,” said a Kurdish official involved in planning the Mosul battle.

“In the west, the initial idea was to have a corridor … but the Hashid (Popular Mobilisation) insisted on closing this loophole to prevent them going to Syria,” he told Reuters.

The battle for Mosul is the biggest in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003. In all, around 100,000 people are fighting on the government side, including Iraqi soldiers and police, “peshmerga” troops of the autonomous Kurdish region and fighters in the Popular Mobilisation units. A U.S.-led international coalition is providing air and ground support.

Iraqi army commanders have repeatedly said that the presence of civilians on the battlefield has complicated and slowed their seven-week-old operation, restricting air strikes and the use of heavy weapons in populated areas.

They considered a change in strategy to allow civilians out, but rejected the idea because they feared that fleeing residents could be massacred by the militants, who have executed civilians to prevent them from escaping other battles. Authorities and aid groups would also struggle to deal with a mass exodus.

KILL BOX

Planning documents drawn up by humanitarian organizations before the campaign, seen by Reuters, show they prepared camps in Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria for around 90,000 refugees expected to head west out of Mosul.

“Iran didn’t agree and insisted that no safe corridor be allowed to Syria,” said a humanitarian worker. “They wanted the whole region west of Mosul to be a kill box.”

Hisham al-Hashemi, an Iraqi analyst on Islamist militants who was briefed on the battle plan in advance, also said it initially envisaged leaving one flank open.

“The first plan had the shape of a horseshoe, allowing for the population and the militants to retreat westward as the main thrust of the offensive came from the east,” he said.

About a week before the launch of the campaign, Lebanese Shi’ite Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, a close ally of Iran, accused the United States of planning to allow Islamic State a way out to Syria.

“The Iraqi army and popular forces must defeat it in Mosul, otherwise, they will be obliged to move to eastern Syria in order to fight the terrorist group,” he said. Hezbollah is fighting in support of Assad in Syria.

Hashid spokesman Karim al-Nuri denied that Tehran was behind the decision to deploy the Shi’ite fighters west of Mosul.

“Iran has no interest here. The majority of these statements are mere analysis – they are simply not true,” he said.

Nevertheless, securing territory west of Mosul by the Iranian-backed militias has other benefits for Iran’s allies, by giving the Shi’ite fighters a launchpad into neighboring Syria to support Assad.

If Islamic State is defeated in Syria and Iraq, Tehran’s allies would gain control of an arc of territory stretching from Iran itself across the Middle East to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

 

American vehicles are seen in Bartila, Iraq December 7, 2016. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

American vehicles are seen in Bartila, Iraq December 7, 2016. REUTERS/Alaa Al-Marjani

RUSSIAN PRESSURE

Iran was not the only country pressing for the escape to be closed west of Mosul. Russia, another powerful Assad ally, also wanted to block any possible movement of militants into Syria, said Hashemi. The Russian defence ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

One of Assad’s biggest enemies, France, was also concerned that hundreds of fighters linked to attacks in Paris and Brussels might escape. The French have contributed ground and air support to the Mosul campaign.

A week after the campaign was launched, French President Francois Hollande said any flow of people out of Mosul would include “terrorists who will try to go further, to Raqqa in particular”.

Still, the battle plan did not foresee closing the road to the west of Mosul until Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi agreed in late October to despatch the Popular Mobilisation militias.

“The government agreed to Iran’s request, thinking that it would take a long time for the Hashid to get to the road to Syria, and during that time the escape route would be open and the battle would still proceed as planned,” Hashemi said.

The Hashid move to cut the western corridor was announced on Oct. 28, 11 days after the start of the wider Mosul campaign. Fighters made swift progress, sweeping up from a base south of Mosul to seal off the western route out of the city.

Abadi “was surprised to see them reaching the road in just a few days,” Hashemi said. “The battle has taken a different shape since then – no food, no fuel is reaching Mosul and Daesh (Islamic State) fighters are bent on fighting to the end.”

IRAQ STRONGHOLD

Once the Iraqi Shi’ite militia advance west of Mosul had begun, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi told his followers there could be no retreat from the city where he first proclaimed his caliphate in July, 2014.

Those tempted to flee should “know that the value of staying on your land with honor is a thousand times better than the price of retreating with shame,” Baghdadi said in an audio recording released five days after the Shi’ite militias announced they were moving to cut off the last route out.

Since then his fighters have launched hundreds of suicide car bombs, mortar barrages and sniper attacks against the advancing forces, using a network of tunnels under residential areas and using civilians as human shields, Iraqi soldiers say.

A senior U.S. officer in international coalition which is supporting the campaign said that waging war amidst civilians would always be tough, but the Baghdad government was best placed to decide on strategy.

“They’ve got 15 years of war (experience)… I can’t think of anyone more calibrated to make that decision and as a result that why as a coalition we supported the government of Iraq’s decision,” Brigadier General Scott Efflandt, deputy commanding general in the coalition, told Reuters.

“The opening and closing of that corridor, hypothetically, realistically, did not fundamentally change the plans of the battle,” he added. “It changes how we prosecute the fight, but that does not necessarily make it easier or harder.”

But the Kurdish official was less sanguine, saying the battle for Mosul was now “more difficult” and could descend into a long drawn out siege similar to those seen in Syria.

It could “turn Mosul into Aleppo,” he said.

(Reporting by Patrick Markey and Maher Chmaytelli in Erbil and Dominic Evans in Baghdad; additional reporting by John Irish in Paris and Tatiana Ustinova in Moscow; writing by Dominic Evans; editing by Peter Graff)

Mosul residents fear cold and hunger of winter siege

People fleeing Islamic State stronghold in Mosul

By Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – No food or fuel has reached Mosul in nearly a week and the onset of rain and cold weather threatens a tough winter for more than a million people still in Islamic State-held areas of the city, residents said on Saturday.

Iraqi troops waging a six-week-old offensive against the militants controlling Mosul have advanced into eastern city districts, while other forces have sealed Mosul’s southern and northern approaches and 10 days ago blocked the road west.

But their advance has been hampered by waves of counter-attacks from the ultra-hardline Islamists who have controlled the city since mid-2014 and built a network of tunnels in preparation for their defense of north Iraq’s largest city.

The slow progress means the campaign is likely to drag on throughout the winter, and has prompted warnings from aid groups that civilians face a near complete siege in the coming months.

A trader in Mosul, speaking by telephone, said no new food or fuel supplies had reached the city since Sunday.

Despite attempts by the militants to keep prices stable, and the arrest last week of dozens of shopkeepers accused of hiking prices, the trader said food had become more expensive and fuel prices had tripled.

“We’ve been living under a real state of siege for a week,” said one resident of west Mosul, several miles (km) from the frontline neighborhoods on the east bank of the Tigris river.

“Two days ago the electricity generator supplying the neighborhood stopped working because of lack of fuel. Water is cut and food prices have risen and it’s terribly cold. We fear the days ahead will be much worse”.

A pipeline supplying water to around 650,000 people in Mosul was hit during fighting this week between the army and Islamic State. A local official said it could not be fixed because the damage was in an area still being fought over.

Winter conditions will also hit the nearly 80,000 people registered by the United Nations as displaced since the start of the Mosul campaign. That number excludes many thousands more who were forcibly moved by Islamic State, or fled from the fighting deeper into territory under its control.

MILITANTS COUNTER ATTACK

Islamic State authorities, trying to portray a sense of normality, released pictures which they said showed a Mosul market on Friday. It showed a crowd of people and a stall selling vegetable oil and canned food but no fresh produce.

They also said they carried out several counter attacks in the last 24 hours against Iraqi troops in eastern Mosul and the mainly Shi’ite Popular Mobilisation forces who have taken territory to the west of the city.

Amaq news agency, which is close to Islamic State, said they retook half of the Shaimaa district in southeast of the city on Friday, destroyed four army bases in the eastern al-Qadisiya al-Thaniya neighborhood and seized ammunition from fleeing soldiers in al-Bakr district, also in the east.

A source in the Counter Terrorism Services, which are spearheading the army offensive, said Islamic State exploited the bad weather and cloud cover, which prevented air support from a U.S.-led international coalition.

He said the militants had taken back some ground, but predicted their gains would be short-lived.

“This is not the first time it happens. We withdraw to avoid civilian losses and then regain control. They can’t hold territory for long,” the source said.

Amaq also said Islamic State fighters waged attacks on Saturday against the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary units near the town of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, showing footage of two damaged vehicles, one with interior ministry markings on it.

A spokesman for the militias said those attacks had been repelled. “Daesh attacked at dawn to try to control the village Tal Zalat,” said Karim Nouri. “Clashes continued for two hours, until Daesh withdrew, leaving bodies (of dead fighters) behind.”

In Baghdad, a car bomb blew up in a crowded market in the center of the city on Saturday, killing seven people and wounding 15, police and medical sources said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State fighters have stepped up attacks in the Iraqi capital and other cities since the start of the Mosul operations.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi launched the Mosul offensive on Oct. 17, aiming to crush Islamic State in the largest city it controls in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The campaign pits a 100,000-strong U.S.-backed coalition of army troops, special forces, federal police, Kurdish fighters and the Popular Mobilisation forces against a few thousand militants in the city.

Defeat would deal a heavy blow to Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria, announced by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from a Mosul mosque two years ago.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Clelia Oziel)

Mosul residents fear cold and hunger of winter siege

Iraqi people collect water in Mosul, Iraq,

By Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – No food or fuel has reached Mosul in nearly a week and the onset of rain and cold weather threatens a tough winter for more than a million people still in Islamic State-held areas of the city, residents said on Saturday.

Iraqi troops waging a six-week-old offensive against the militants controlling Mosul have advanced into eastern city districts, while other forces have sealed Mosul’s southern and northern approaches and 10 days ago blocked the road west.

But their advance has been hampered by waves of counter-attacks from the ultra-hardline Islamists who have controlled the city since mid-2014 and built a network of tunnels in preparation for their defense of north Iraq’s largest city.

The slow progress means the campaign is likely to drag on throughout the winter, and has prompted warnings from aid groups that civilians face a near complete siege in the coming months.

A trader in Mosul, speaking by telephone, said no new food or fuel supplies had reached the city since Sunday.

Despite attempts by the militants to keep prices stable, and the arrest last week of dozens of shopkeepers accused of hiking prices, the trader said food had become more expensive and fuel prices had tripled.

“We’ve been living under a real state of siege for a week,” said one resident of west Mosul, several miles (km) from the frontline neighborhoods on the east bank of the Tigris river.

“Two days ago the electricity generator supplying the neighborhood stopped working because of lack of fuel. Water is cut and food prices have risen and it’s terribly cold. We fear the days ahead will be much worse”.

A pipeline supplying water to around 650,000 people in Mosul was hit during fighting this week between the army and Islamic State. A local official said it could not be fixed because the damage was in an area still being fought over.

Winter conditions will also hit the nearly 80,000 people registered by the United Nations as displaced since the start of the Mosul campaign. That number excludes many thousands more who were forcibly moved by Islamic State, or fled from the fighting deeper into territory under its control.

MILITANTS COUNTER ATTACK

Islamic State authorities, trying to portray a sense of normality, released pictures which they said showed a Mosul market on Friday. It showed a crowd of people and a stall selling vegetable oil and canned food but no fresh produce.

They also said they carried out several counter attacks in the last 24 hours against Iraqi troops in eastern Mosul and the mainly Shi’ite Popular Mobilisation forces who have taken territory to the west of the city.

Amaq news agency, which is close to Islamic State, said they retook half of the Shaimaa district in southeast of the city on Friday, destroyed four army bases in the eastern al-Qadisiya al-Thaniya neighborhood and seized ammunition from fleeing soldiers in al-Bakr district, also in the east.

A source in the Counter Terrorism Services, which are spearheading the army offensive, said Islamic State exploited the bad weather and cloud cover, which prevented air support from a U.S.-led international coalition.

He said the militants had taken back some ground, but predicted their gains would be short-lived.

“This is not the first time it happens. We withdraw to avoid civilian losses and then regain control. They can’t hold territory for long,” the source said.

Amaq also said Islamic State fighters waged attacks on Saturday against the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary units near the town of Tal Afar, west of Mosul, showing footage of two damaged vehicles, one with interior ministry markings on it.

A spokesman for the militias said those attacks had been repelled. “Daesh attacked at dawn to try to control the village Tal Zalat,” said Karim Nouri. “Clashes continued for two hours, until Daesh withdrew, leaving bodies (of dead fighters) behind.”

In Baghdad, a car bomb blew up in a crowded market in the center of the city on Saturday, killing seven people and wounding 15, police and medical sources said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but Islamic State fighters have stepped up attacks in the Iraqi capital and other cities since the start of the Mosul operations.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi launched the Mosul offensive on Oct. 17, aiming to crush Islamic State in the largest city it controls in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

The campaign pits a 100,000-strong U.S.-backed coalition of army troops, special forces, federal police, Kurdish fighters and the Popular Mobilisation forces against a few thousand militants in the city.

Defeat would deal a heavy blow to Islamic State’s self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria, announced by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from a Mosul mosque two years ago.

(Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Clelia Oziel)

Beaten and bruised, detainee recounts Islamic State torture

Aiden Jassim's children sit next to their uncle Abdul Ilah Jassim during an interview with Reuters in Fadiliyah, Iraq,

By John Davison

FADILIYA, Iraq (Reuters) – Abdel Razzaq Jalal paused, visibly traumatized, as he told how Islamic State militants tortured him in a Mosul prison to force him to say he was a spy. “I never confessed. I knew the punishment would be death,” he said.

The ultra-hardline group arrested the 39-year-old in his village near Mosul in northern Iraq earlier this year, accusing him of spying for Kurdish forces.

After six nights and seven days of beatings, abuse and death threats, he says the militants let him go, after an Islamic State judge ruled there was not enough evidence to sentence him.

Jalal was lucky to escape with his life. Islamic State has executed scores of people it accused of spying in Mosul in recent weeks alone, as U.S.-backed Iraqi forces push further into its city stronghold.

He knew it could have been worse. The fate of several fellow villagers from Fadiliya, a few miles northeast of Mosul, and of many others arrested elsewhere during Islamic State’s more than two-year rule, remains unknown.

While the physical scars faded – Jalal showed months-old pictures on his phone of bruises and cuts all over his body – the ordeal remains etched in his memory.

“They hung me upside down from my feet and beat me for two hours. That was on the first night,” Jalal said.

“They used cables, wooden sticks, and one of them – there were three or four – pistol-whipped me repeatedly on my head.”

The militants, all from Mosul’s surrounding areas, tried to make him confess to spying for Kurdish peshmerga forces who had been fighting against Islamic State, he said.

When he refused, they stepped up the abuse and threats.

“The second day, they lay me flat on my stomach with my hands tied behind my back. One man stood on my legs, another on my head, and they began raising my arms. I thought my chest was going to break.”

Before he was tried, the militants put him into an orange jumpsuit – the clothing in which Islamic State often kills its victims – and told him he would be sentenced to death by decapitation.

Two of his more than 40 cell mates were killed that way, he said, after they confessed under duress to directing air strikes against Islamic State fighters. Reuters was not able to independently verify his account.

STILL MISSING

Jalal said he did not know why he was arrested. He was a local member of a Kurdish political party, he said, but denied spying.

“They had every detail on me and my family. It must have been from informers – locals – in the village,” he said quietly.

Jalal had been terrified of rearrest. Upon returning to Fadiliya after his incarceration, he told villagers he was well treated, in case Islamic State’s spies reported back to them.

A small number of Islamic State sympathizers or supporters in Fadiliya have been rounded up by Kurdish security forces since the peshmerga recaptured it in late October, local officials say.

“If I found another informer, I’d turn him in – even if it were my own brother,” Jalal said.

For him, the ordeal is over, but others in Fadiliya suspect their relatives are still suffering a similar fate, or worse.

Abdel Ilah Jassem’s 25-year-old brother Iden was arrested at an Islamic State checkpoint just outside the village more than two years ago. He has not heard from him since.

“I went to a Daesh (Islamic State) police station. They said Iden had been killed, but didn’t provide me with proof – no body, not even a paper saying he was executed,” said Jassem, 45, who lost his other brother in 1988 in the Iran-Iraq war.

“I’m sure he’s still alive,” he said, referring to Iden. “Every day I ask people in the area if they’ve heard anything new. So far, there’s nothing.”

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Giles Elgood)

Mosul edges towards full siege, families struggle to find food

An Iraqi soldier searches a house during clashes with Islamic State fighters in Al-Qasar, southeast of Mosul.

By Maher Chmaytelli and Ulf Laessing

BAGHDAD/MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – A full siege is developing in Mosul as poor families struggle to feed themselves after prices rose sharply following the U.S.-backed offensive on the Islamic State-held city in northern Iraq, humanitarian workers said on Tuesday.

Some of the poorest families are finding it hard to feed themselves while others are hoarding and hiding food as they expect prices to rise further as the battle that started six weeks ago takes hold of the city.

A Kurdish Iraqi woman inspects her destroyed kitchen after returning to her house in the town of Bashiqa which was retaken by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters following a battle with Islamic State militants,

A Kurdish Iraqi woman inspects her destroyed kitchen after returning to her house in the town of Bashiqa which was retaken by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters following a battle with Islamic State militants, north of Mosul, Iraq November 29, 2016. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

“Key informants are telling us that poor families are struggling to put sufficient food on their tables,” U.N Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, Lise Grande, told Reuters. “This is very worrying.”

Iraqi government and Kurdish forces surround the city from the north, east and south, while Popular Mobilisation forces – a coalition of Iranian-backed Shi’ite groups – are trying to close in from the west.

Retail prices rose sharply last week, after Popular Mobilisation fighters cut the supply route to Mosul from the Syrian half of the self-styled caliphate, declared by Islamic State two years ago over Sunni-populated parts of Iraq and Syria.

More than a million people are still believed to live in parts of Mosul under the control of the Islamic State fighters, who seized the largest city in northern Iraq as part of a lightning advance across a third of the country in 2014.

With the last supply route cut off, basic commodity prices in Mosul could double “in the short term”, said a humanitarian worker, who declined to be identified.

Some 100,000 Iraqi government troops, Kurdish security forces and mainly Shi’ite militiamen are participating in the assault on Mosul that began on Oct. 17, with air and ground support from a U.S.-led international military coalition.

The capture of Mosul, Islamic State’s last major urban stronghold in Iraq, is seen as crucial towards dismantling the caliphate.

“ACUTE NEED”

Iraqi forces moving from the east have captured about a quarter of Mosul, trying to advance to the Tigris river that runs through its center, in the biggest battle in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

“In a worst case, we envision that families who are already in trouble in Mosul will find themselves in even more acute need.” Grande said. “The longer it takes to liberate Mosul, the harder conditions become for families.”

Islamic State arrested on Sunday about 30 shop owners accused of raising food prices in the city, to try to suppress discontent, witnesses said on Monday.

The group is relentlessly cracking down on people who could help the offensive in Iraq. Most of the people executed previously in Mosul were former police and army officers, suspected of disloyalty or plotting rebellions against the militants’ harsh rule.

The Iraqi military estimates there are 5,000-6,000 insurgents in Mosul, dug in amid civilians to hamper air strikes, resisting the advancing troops with suicide car bombs and sniper and mortar fire that also kill civilians.

An air strike targeting Islamic State fighters hit a clinic south of Mosul on October 18, killing at least eight civilians, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

NO RETREAT

Iraqi and coalition forces did not confirm the report, which said two militants and the Sunni hardline group’s transport minister were also killed in the strike.

Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, believed to be somewhere near the Syrian border, has told his fighters there can be no retreat from the city.

Some 74,000 civilians have fled Mosul so far, and the United Nations is preparing for a worst-case scenario which foresees more than a million people made homeless as winter descends and food shortages set in.

A Reuters correspondent in eastern Mosul saw civilians fleeing the fighting in Aden, a district supposed to be under Iraqi government control, in an indication of the difficulty the troops are encountering in holding terrain.

“Daesh is still there,” said Ehab, a high school student, referring to Islamic State by one of its Arab acronyms. “They drive around in cars; the situation is very, very difficult there. I am glad I made it out alive.”

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Millership)

Islamic State gone, Mosul district residents adjust to new life

A woman waves a white flag in Mosul, Iraq

By Isabel Coles

GOGJALI, Iraq (Reuters) – Until three weeks ago, many of Abu Osama’s customers were Islamic State militants who brought their wives and children to his pharmacy on the eastern edge of Mosul for injections and treatment.

Now, most of them are Iraqi security forces who recaptured the Gogjali neighborhood earlier this month and are pushing further into the city, which has been under Islamic State control for more than two years.

As the militants retreat, civilians are adjusting to a new reality in their wake and a clearer picture is emerging of what they did to survive the punishments and deprivation of Islamic State rule.

“Whether Daesh (Islamic State) or army: my door is open to everyone,” said Abu Osama, taking the blood pressure of an Iraqi policeman. “If my worst enemy comes here, I must treat him.”

Several Islamic State militants, both local and foreign, lived in Gogjali and it was mainly their families that visited the pharmacy because the militants themselves were often away, Abu Osama said.

The front of his shop and those next door are marked with the Arabic letter “z” for zakat, meaning alms, and beside it an identification number Islamic State bureaucrats assigned to record donations made at the shop for their self-proclaimed caliphate.

Advancing Iraqi forces have sprayed Shi’ite slogans over it.

The 40-year old opened the pharmacy after Mosul fell to Islamic State and the salary he received as an employee of the Iraqi health ministry was cut by the government as it sought to choke off funding to the militants, who were skimming the pay of public sector workers in areas they controlled.

The militants wanted Abu Osama to work for them in a hospital, but he refused because it would have meant pledging allegiance to the group, and he does not agree with their hardline ideology.

 

A displaced woman who was injured in clashes and fleeing from Islamic State militants of Mosul, receives treatment at a hospital west of Erbil, Iraq. REUTERS/Azad Lashkari

A displaced woman who was injured in clashes and fleeing from Islamic State militants of Mosul, receives treatment at a hospital west of Erbil, Iraq. REUTERS/Azad Lashkari

According to that ideology, the depiction of living creatures is un-Islamic because it can lead to idolatry. After a militant upbraided him for displaying a poster with an image of a baby on the wall of his pharmacy, Abu Osama blotted out its eyes with a black marker pen and then did the same to every label featuring a human being.

The 500 dinar note ($0.40), which bears an image of a statue, was banned for the same reason, according to several civilians.

CHINESE, INDIAN MEDICINE

All medicine came from Syria — Mosul’s only outlet to the world as an array of forces slowly closed in on the city in Iraq. Syrian traders imported cheap Chinese and Indian medicine via Turkey and paid Islamic State a tax to bring it to market in Mosul, Abu Osama said.

By the time medicine reached his still sparsely stocked shelves, the price had tripled, and many of his customers could not afford to buy it, so he sold it to them on credit and is now owed 1.25 million Iraq dinars ($1,016).

Since women were obliged by Islamic State to veil their faces completely, Abu Osama cannot be sure who owes him what, he said.

Standing in the pharmacy, forty-three-year old Sohaib commented that if he became separated from his wife in a crowded marketplace, she would have to find him, as he could not distinguish her from all the other women shrouded from head to toe in black.

Abu Osama could treat women only when they were accompanied by a male relative, and if a female patient lifted her veil before him and Islamic State’s vice squad found out, he would be held accountable. It never happened to him, but the militants punish such infractions with fines and whipping.

Residents of Gogjali said Islamic State’s laws were less strictly enforced there because it is far from the city center.

When Iraqi special forces took the neighborhood, two of the militants left their wives behind, locals said, identifying the women as Russian. The jihadi brides tried to flee Mosul among displaced civilians but were found out and detained by Iraqi security forces, according to a soldier sitting in the pharmacy.

“They were unbelievably beautiful,” he said.

Several doors down, twenty-seven year old Ammar, who runs a grocery shop, said the militants were his best customers because they had more money than anyone else.

“They chatted with us and said we must fight jihad. Everyone preached to us, but each to their own,” he said.

A woman holds up a white flag as she runs to greet her relative in Mosul, Iraq November

A woman holds up a white flag as she runs to greet her relative in Mosul, Iraq November 27, 2016. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic

All the goods he sold came from Syria, he said, but now that route is blocked too, and several traders from the nearby Kurdish region are taking advantage of the opening in the market.

Outside the grocery shop, a Kurdish trader unloaded goods from a van, including items banned by Islamic State such as cigarettes, biscuits made in Iran and Brazilian canned meat.

“It says halal on the tin, but they said it wasn’t,” Ammar said, shrugging.

Occasionally, the sound of a mortar or a burst of gunfire sends people milling in the street scattering and diving for cover, but some, now accustomed to the sounds of war, barely flinch and continue as normal.

(Editing by Patrick Markey and Peter Graff)

Iraqi forces say 1,000 Islamic State fighters killed in Mosul

Men sit on the ground as an Iraqi Special forces intelligence team check their ID cards as they search for Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq

By Patrick Markey and Ulf Laessing

BARTELLA, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi special forces battling to clear Islamic State from eastern Mosul have killed nearly 1,000 militants but fighting has slowed as troops face a mobile enemy hidden among thousands of civilians in the city, a top commander said.

Six weeks into a major offensive, Iraqi forces have captured nearly half of eastern Mosul, moving from district to district against jihadist snipers, suicide attackers and car bombs.

Elite Iraqi troops, known as the “Golden Division”, are the only brigades to have entered Mosul from the east, with Iraqi army, federal police and Kurdish Peshmerga units surrounding the city to the north and south. Shi’ite militias are trying to complete the encirclement from the west.

The U.S.-trained Counter Terrorism Service unit breached Islamic State’s defenses at the end of October, but has been slowed by the militants’ mobile tactics and concern over civilian casualties preventing the use of tanks and heavy armor.

Major General Abdul Ghani al-Asadi, one of the commanders of the special forces, said troops had adapted their tactics, surrounding one district at a time to cut off the militants’ supplies and protect civilians.

“Progress was faster at the start. The reason is we were operating before in areas without residents,” Asadi told Reuters in Bartella, on Mosul’s outskirts.

“We have arrived in populated districts. So how do we protect civilians? We have sealed off district after district.”

He said around 990 militants had been killed in fighting in the east so far. He would not say how many casualties there were among government special forces.

“We have made changes to plans, partly due to the changing nature of the enemy … Daesh (Islamic State) is not based in one location, but moving from here to there,” he said.

“Tanks don’t work here, artillery is not effective. Planes from the coalition force and the air force are restricted because of the civilians.”

THOUSANDS DISPLACED

The Iraqi government has asked civilians in Mosul to stay at home during the offensive, as humanitarian organizations say they cannot cope with an influx of hundred of thousands of people displaced from the city.

More than one million people are believed to remain in the city, the largest in northern Iraq.

Defeating Islamic State in Mosul, Islamic State’s last major bastion in Iraq, is seen as vital to destroying the “caliphate” declared by the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, from the pulpit of Mosul’s Grand Mosque in July 2014.

But commanders have said the battle could take months. Dozens of districts must be taken in the east before attacking forces reach the Tigris River which splits Mosul into east and west. U.S. air strikes have taken out four of the five river bridges used by the militants.

Major General Najm al-Jubbouri, one of the army’s top commanders, told Reuters that the western part of the city could be the more dangerous.

To the south, Iraqi army brigades are now advancing slowly on the remaining Islamic State-held villages before reaching the city limits. To the west, the mostly Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias known as Popular Mobilisation have cut off the highway to Syria, but they have yet to close in on the city.

“The force left in front of us is small, unable to stop our advance. Their spirit is broken,” Asadi said.

“We have killed more than 992 fighters on our front plus more wounded … Their supplies and communications to the outside world are cut. They stage fewer suicide bombings.”

Iraqi military estimates initially put the number of insurgents in Mosul at 5,000 to 6,000, facing a 100,000-strong coalition force. But Asadi said the figure for the Islamic State presence may have been too high.

Iraqi authorities have not released estimates of civilian casualties but the United Nations says growing numbers of injured, both civilians and military, are overwhelming aid groups.

(Reporting by Patrick Markey; editing by Giles Elgood)

Civilians flee as Shi’ite groups close in on flashpoint town west of Mosul

Displace Iraqi family

By Isabel Coles and Saif Hameed

ERBIL/BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) – Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians have fled Tal Afar as Shi’ite paramilitary groups close in the Islamic State-held town on the road between Mosul and Raqqa, the main cities of the militant group’s self-styled caliphate in Iraq and Syria.

The exodus from Tal Afar, 60 km (40 miles) west of Mosul, is causing concern among humanitarian organizations as some of the fleeing civilians are heading deeper into insurgents’ territory, where aid cannot be sent to them, provincial officials said.

Popular Mobilisation units, a coalition of mostly Iranian-trained and backed militias, are trying to encircle Tal Afar, a mostly ethnic Turkmen town, as part of the offensive to capture Mosul, the last major city stronghold of Islamic State in Iraq.

About 3,000 families have left the town, with about half heading southwest, toward Syria, and half northward, into Kurdish-held territory, said Nuraldin Qablan, a Tal Afar representative in the Nineveh provincial council, now based in the Kurdish capital Erbil.

“We ask Kurdish authorities to open a safe passage for them,” he told Reuters.

He said Islamic State started on Sunday night to allow people to leave after it fired mortars at Popular Mobilisation positions at the airport, south of the city, and Popular Mobilisation forces responded.

The offensive started on Oct. 17 with air and ground support from a U.S.-led coalition. It is turning into the most complex campaign in Iraq since the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein and empowered the nation’s Shi’ite majority.

The people fleeing Tal Afar are from the Sunni community, which makes up a majority in the Nineveh province in and around Mosul. The town also had a Shi’ite community, which fled in 2014 when the hardline Sunni group swept through the region.

Turkey is alarmed that regional rival Iran could extend its power through proxy groups to an area close to the Turkish and Syrian borders, where Ankara is backing rebels opposed to the Russian and Iranian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Citing its close ties to Tal Afar’s Turkmen’s population, Turkey has threatened to intervene to prevent revenge killings should Popular Mobilisation forces, known in Arabic as Hashid Shaabi, storm the town.

“People are fleeing due to the Hashid’s advance, there are great fears among the civilians,” said Qablan, who is also the deputy head of Nineveh’s provincial council.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi tried to allay fears of ethnic and sectarian killings in Tal Afar, saying any force sent to recapture it would reflect the city’s diversity.

Cutting the road to Tal Afar would seal off Mosul as the city is already surrounded to the north, south and east by Iraqi government and Kurdish peshmerga forces.

Iraq’s U.S.-trained Counter Terrorism Service unit breached Islamic State’s defenses in east Mosul at the end of October and is fighting to expand a foothold it gained there.

AIR STRIKES ON MOSUL

Iraqi military estimates put the number of insurgents in Mosul at 5,000 to 6,000, facing a 100,000-strong coalition of Iraqi government units, peshmerga fighters and Shi’ite militias.

Mosul’s capture is seen as crucial towards dismantling the caliphate, and Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, believed to have withdrawn to a remote area near the Syrian border, has told his fighters there can be no retreat.

A Mosul resident said air strikes have intensified on the western part of the city, which is divided by the Tigris river running through its center.

The strikes targeted an industrial area where Islamic State is thought to be making booby traps and transforming vehicles into car bombs, he said.

The militants are dug in among more than a million civilians as a defense tactic to hamper the strikes. They are moving around the city through tunnels, driving suicide car bombs into advancing troops and hitting them with sniper and mortar fire.

The Iraqi authorities did not release an overall estimate of the casualties, but the United Nations warned on Saturday that growing numbers of wounded civilians and military are overwhelming the capacity of the government and international aid groups.

More than 68,000 people are registered as displaced because of the fighting, moving from villages and towns around the city to government-held areas, according to U.N. estimates.

The figure does not include the thousands of people rounded up in villages around Mosul and forced to accompany Islamic State fighters to cover their retreat towards the city as human shields. It also does not included the 3,000 families which have fled Tal Afar.

In some cases, men of fighting age were separated from those groups and summarily killed, according to residents and rights groups.

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Dominic Evans)

Christian heritage ransacked as monastery retaken from Islamic State

Fighters from the "Kataeb Babylon", a group of Christian fighters who fight alongside the Hashd Shabi, Shi'ite fighters, gather at the Mar Behnam monastery after the town was recaptured from the Islamic State, in Ali Rash, southeast of Mosul, Iraq

By Stephen Kalin

KHIDIR ILYAS, Iraq (Reuters) – The history pages of Iraq’s Christian community lie in charred fragments on the floor of a fourth-century monastery near Mosul which Islamic State militants ransacked during a two-year occupation that ended over the weekend.

The jihadists at the Mar Behnam monastery burned a collection of books about Christian theology, scraped off inscriptions written in Syriac – the language used by Jesus – and demolished sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the monastery’s patron saint.

They removed the site’s crosses and tried to erase any mention of Behnam, the son of an Assyrian king who, according to popular legend, built the monastery as penance for killing both his children after they converted to Christianity.

“Their fundamental goal was to destroy Christian history and civilization in the Nineveh plains,” Duraid Elias, commander of the Babylon Brigades, a Christian militia that helped retake the site, told Reuters during a visit on Monday.

The Nineveh plains, a sprawling region north and east of Mosul, are a mosaic of ethnic and religious communities with roots dating back to ancient Mesopotamia.

The Sunni Muslim hardliners of Islamic State have targeted the adherents and religious sites of those minority groups across the area, which it seized in 2014 during a blitz across Iraq and neighboring Syria.

At the time, the group issued an ultimatum to Christians: pay a tax, convert to Islam, or die by the sword. Most fled toward the autonomous Kurdish region, including a few dozen monks who left Mar Behnam with only the clothes on their backs.

As a 100,000-strong alliance of Iraqi forces now attempts to oust Islamic State from the city of Mosul, the scale of destruction in nearby Christian areas is gradually being documented.

The jihadists had converted Mar Behnam, Iraq’s largest monastery, into a headquarters for the Hisba — morality police, which enforced strict rules against such things as smoking, men shaving their beards and women baring their faces in public, according to Elias.

A sitting room had been turned into a medical clinic, and the monks’ bedrooms were used to hold transgressors. A remote corner of the complex was filled with dozens of satellite dishes the commander said had been confiscated from residents nearby.

Islamic State graffiti covers the monastery’s walls, including the group’s motto: “Remaining and expanding”. Another scrawl includes the date Dec. 24, 2014 – one of two Christmases the jihadists spent in control of the site.

Five weeks into Iraq’s long-awaited offensive to retake Mosul, which itself once had a sizeable Christian population, the city is nearly surrounded, but government forces have established only a small foothold in a few eastern districts.

Fighting has laid waste to entire towns and villages, while Islamic State booby-traps, including in and around the monastery, mean it could be months or even years before some residents can return home.

The Mar Behnam monastery is seen after the town was recaptured from the Islamic State, in Ali Rash, southeast of Mosul, Iraq

The Mar Behnam monastery is seen after the town was recaptured from the Islamic State, in Ali Rash, southeast of Mosul, Iraq November 21, 2016. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

EYE FOR AN EYE

The Baghdad-backed Babylon Brigades are the type of force that Iraq’s Western allies have pushed to participate in the Mosul campaign in an attempt to secure local support for the expected rollback of Islamic State.

The Christian fighters at Mar Behnam monastery on Monday wore an assortment of military uniforms, carried large wooden crosses in their pickup trucks and flew banners including, incongruously, flags used by Iraq’s powerful Shi’ite Muslim militias.

Many of the gunmen sported black headbands declaring devotion to Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and one had affixed a religious icon to his bulletproof vest, next to a hand grenade and two single bullets.

Elias, the commander, said his unit had fought alongside the Iraqi army to retake the monastery and the village of Khidir Ilyas where it is located. But the regular troops had since departed, leaving his men in apparent control of the area.

After showing Reuters around the site as gunfire rang out in the distance, he welcomed six new volunteers into the Babylon Brigades, issuing them with uniforms and weapons in exchange for a simple vow to protect the area.

His men, part of a dwindling population of Arab Christians across the Middle East, are driven by a desire to keep their community alive after Islamic State threatened to destroy it for good.

“We are proving to the world that Christians are not weak. We are stronger than they imagined,” said Elias.

He told Reuters his forces had so far demolished three or four homes thought to belong to Islamic State fighters in Khidir Ilyas to keep them from ever returning.

“There are others. We are going one by one: for every Christian house they blew up, we blow up a house next to it,” he said from atop the monastery, pointing out one such pair of buildings.

“This is war. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

(Reporting by Stephen Kalin; editing by Giles Elgood)

U.S. strike destroys bridge, restricts Islamic State in Mosul

Shi'ite fighters stand with their weapons on the top of a building in Ali Rash, southeast of Mosul, Iraq

By Saif Hameed and Stephanie Nebehay

BAGHDAD/GENEVA (Reuters) – U.S. forces backing an Iraqi army campaign against Islamic State in Mosul carried out an air strike on a bridge spanning the Tigris river, restricting militant movements between western and eastern parts of the city, a U.S. official said on Tuesday.

U.S.-trained Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service forces are pushing deeper into east Mosul, the last major city controlled by the Sunni hard-line group in Iraq, while army and police units, Shi’ite militias and Kurdish fighters surround it to the west, south and north.

Militants have steadily retreated into Mosul from outlying areas. The army’s early advances have slowed as militants dig in, using the more than 1 million civilians inside the city as a shield, moving through tunnels, and hitting troops with suicide bombers, snipers and mortar fire.

Five bridges span the Tigris that runs through Mosul. They have all been mined and boobytrapped by militants who took over the city two years ago as they swept through northern Iraq and declared a caliphate in parts of Iraq and neighboring Syria.

Despite planting the mines, Islamic State fighters have so far been able to continue using those bridges which have not yet been destroyed by air strikes.

Air Force Colonel John Dorrian, a Baghdad-based spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition, said on Tuesday an air strike hit the number four bridge, the southernmost, in the past 48 hours.

“This effort impedes Daesh’s freedom of movement in Mosul. It inhibits their ability to resupply or reinforce their fighters throughout the city,” he said using an Arabic acronym for the militant group.

A month ago, a U.S. air strike destroyed the No. 2 bridge in the center of the city and two weeks later another strike took out the No. 5 bridge to the north.

The United Nations’ International Organisation for Migration expressed concern that the destruction of the bridges could obstruct the evacuation of civilians.

“That is a concern of IOM because this is going to leave hundreds of thousands without a quick way out of the combat,” spokesman Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva.

COMMANDERS CAPTURED

The battle for Mosul, launched five weeks ago, is turning into the largest military campaign in more than a decade of conflict in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The Iraqi military estimates around 5,000 Islamic State fighters are in Mosul. A 100,000-strong coalition of Iraqi government forces, Kurdish fighters and Shi’ite paramilitary units is surrounding the city.

Mosul’s capture would be a major step towards dismantling the caliphate, and Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, believed to have withdrawn to a remote area near the Syrian border, has told his fighters to stay and fight to the end.

Counter terrorism units and an army armored division are the only forces to have breached the city limits from the eastern side. Other army and federal police units have yet to enter the northern and the southern sides.

A Kurdish security source said on Tuesday four Islamic State commanders were captured in a U.S. special operation near Baaj, a town close to the Syrian border. Baghdadi was not among them. The coalition did not confirm the operation.

Islamic State said it launched an attack on the north-western front of Mosul, seizing a duty free zone and oil depots located a dozen kilometers from the city limits. The army did not confirm the claim.

Iranian-backed militias have captured the Tal Afar air base, west of Mosul, part of their campaign to choke off the route between the Syrian and Iraqi parts of the caliphate Islamic State declared in 2014.

The number of people displaced by the fighting in and around Mosul has slightly decreased, an indication that some people have began returning home in places retaken by government forces, according to the IOM.

“68,112 displaced is actually a downtick from couple of days ago,” said Millman. It’s “worth noting because it indicates that some people are already starting to return to safe areas in the region.”

The number of registered displaced people was over 68,500 on Monday. The figure does not include the thousands of people rounded up in villages around Mosul and forced to accompany Islamic State fighters to cover their retreat towards the city.

An Iranian-backed Shi’ite group taking part in the offensive denied a Human Rights Watch report that it detained and beat 10 shepherds, including a boy, from a village near Mosul on November 3.

Human Rights Watch on Tuesday said the League of the Righteous, or Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, also stole the village’s entire flock of sheep.

“These reports are completely wrong, they aim to stall the operation” against Islamic State, said Asa’ib’s military spokesman Jawad al-Talabawi.

The Iraqi government has not published an overall death toll for the offensive, whether among military or civilians. The warring sides claim to have killed thousands in enemy ranks.

(Writing by Patrick Markey and Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Dominic Evans)