Iraqi forces
opened exit routes for hundreds of civilians to flee the Old City of Mosul on
Saturday as they battled to retake the quarter from Islamic State militants
mounting a last stand in what was the de facto capital of their self-declared
caliphate.
U.S.-trained
urban warfare units were channeling their onslaught along two perpendicular
streets that converge in the heart of the Old City, aiming to isolate the
jihadist insurgents in four pockets.
The week-old
battle in the Old City is turning into the deadliest of the eight-month
U.S.-backed campaign to take back the northern city, which fell to the
militants in June 2014.
A Reuters correspondent
saw a young girl with facial injuries walking dazed and shocked across the
frontline out of heavily-populated district with a group of neighbors. All her
family was killed when their house collapsed, they said.
The United
Nations voiced alarm on Saturday at the rising death toll among civilians in
the fighting, saying as many as 12 were killed and hundreds injured on Friday.
“Fighting is
very intense in the Old City and civilians are at extreme, almost unimaginable
risk. There are reports that thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of people
are being held as human shields (by Islamic State)," Lise Grande, the U.N.
humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said in a statement. "Hundreds of
civilians, including children, are being shot."
Iraqi
authorities are hoping to declare victory in the northern Iraqi city in the
Muslim Eid holiday, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, during
the next few days.
Helicopter
gunships were assisting the ground thrust, firing at insurgent emplacements in
the Old City, a Reuters correspondent reported from a location near the
frontlines.
The
government advance was carving out escape corridors for civilians marooned
behind Islamic State lines.
There was a
steady trickle of fleeing families on Saturday, some with injured and
malnourished children. "My baby only had bread and water for the past
eight days," one mother said.
At least 100
civilians reached the safety of a government-held area west of the Old City in
one 20-minute period, tired, scared and hungry. Soldiers gave them food and
water.
More than
100,000 civilians, of whom half are believed to be children, remain trapped in
the crumbling old houses of the Old City, with little food, water or medical
treatment.
The
urban-warfare forces were leading the campaign to clear the Sunni Islamist
militants from the maze of Old City alleyways, moving on foot house-to-house in
locations too cramped for the use of armored combat vehicles.
French
journalist Veronique Robert has died in Paris after being wounded in an
explosion in Mosul earlier this week, her employer France Televisions said on
Saturday.
The mine
explosion killed Iraqi journalist Bakhtiyar Haddad and French journalist Stephane
Villeneuve while another freelance reporter suffered minor injuries.
Aid
organizations and Iraqi authorities say Islamic State was trying to prevent
civilians from leaving so as to use them as human shields. Hundreds of
civilians fleeing the Old City have been killed in the past three weeks.
A U.S.-led
international coalition is providing ground and air support in the
eight-month-old campaign to seize Mosul, the largest city the militants came to
control in a shock offensive in Iraq and neighboring Syria three years ago.
U.S.-supported
Iraqi government offensives have wrested back several important urban centers
in the country's west and north from Islamic State over the past 18 months.
HISTORIC
MOSQUE BLOWN UP BY MILITANTS
Military
analysts said Baghdad's campaign to recover Mosul gathered pace after Islamic
State blew up the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque with its famous leaning minaret
on Wednesday.
The mosque's
destruction, while condemned by Iraqi and U.N. authorities as another cultural
crime by the jihadists, gave troops more freedom to press their onslaught as
they no longer had to worry about damaging the ancient site.
It was from
the mosque that Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced himself to
the world for the first time as the "caliph", or ruler of all Muslims,
on July 4, 2014. Mosul's population at the time was more than 2 million.
Baghdadi
fled into the desert expanse extending across Iraq and Syria in the early phase
of the Mosul offensive, leaving the fighting there to local IS commanders,
according to U.S. and Iraqi officials. Recent Russian reports that he was
killed have not been confirmed by the coalition or Iraqi authorities.
The Iraqi
government once hoped to take Mosul by the end of 2016, but the campaign
dragged on as IS reinforced positions in inner-city neighborhoods of the city's
western half, carried out suicide car and motorbike bomb attacks, laid booby
traps and kept up barrages of sniper and mortar fire.
By this
weekend, the area still under IS control was less than 2 square km (0.77 sq miles)
in extent, skirting the western bank of the Tigris River that bisects Mosul.
Islamic
State retaliated for government advances on Friday evening with a triple
bombing in a neighborhood in eastern Mosul, which Baghdad's forces recaptured
in January.
The attack
was carried out by three people who detonated explosive belts, killing five,
including three policemen, and wounding 19, according to a military statement
on Saturday.
The fall of
Mosul would mark the end of the Iraqi half of Islamic State's "caliphate"
as a quasi-state structure, but IS would still hold sizeable, mainly rural and
small-town tracts of both Iraq and Syria.
In eastern
Syria, Islamic State's so-called capital, Raqqa, is now nearly encircled by a
U.S.-backed Kurdish-led coalition.
REUTERS*
0 Comments