Reuters - White flags
flying from their radio antennas, the pickup trucks laden with refugees and a
few precious livestock snaked out of Tub Zawa after a day of heavy bombardment
drove Islamic State fighters from the village on Mosul's eastern edge.
Around 700
people fled the village early on Tuesday, escaping the military operation to
recapture Iraq's second biggest city from the jihadists who have controlled it
for nearly two and a half years.
In the first
10 days of the Mosul campaign, the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga fighters
backed by U.S.-led air forces and troops have made steady gains through often
depopulated villages east and south of Mosul.
But as they
approach the city itself, still home to more than a million people, the
advancing forces are pushing the frontlines into villages like Tub Zawa where
residents had until this week stayed put.
That will make
the fighting more difficult and deadly, and prompted a senior United Nations
official in Iraq to say an exodus from Mosul, and a potential humanitarian
crisis, could be only a few days away.
Tub Zawa,
close to the main road into Mosul from the east, is one of the first populated
villages reached by Iraqi counter-terrorism forces after they cleared Islamic
State last week from a Christian region which has been largely empty since
2014.
Abdul Bassit,
an elderly shepherd from the predominantly Sunni Arab settlement, said he had
sheltered for hours with a dozen relatives under the stairs of their house on
Monday while the military bombarded the village for hours with mortars and air
strikes, and the jihadists responded with car bombs.
When they fled
their homes the next day, they took only their most important possessions with
them, which in many cases was livestock.
Women and
small children shared space with sheep, goats, calves and chickens in the beds
of pickup trucks on their journey to a camp for displaced people at the
Kurdish-controlled town of Hassan Sham, further east.
SHAVING BEARDS
So far the
number of people displaced since the Mosul campaign was formally launched on
Oct. 17 is relatively modest - the International Organization for Migration
says just over 10,000 people have been uprooted.
Those who head
into Kurdish areas, like the Tub Zawa families, are checked by Kurdish
peshmerga on the road linking Mosul to the Kurdish city of Erbil, about 75 km
(45 miles) away.
On Tuesday,
the villagers parked their cars and pickup trucks along the Erbil highway, as
the peshmerga sorted through them. Women and children were bussed quickly to
the camp but men sat in vehicles for hours waiting to undergo security
screening.
Some of them
took the opportunity to shave thick beards they say Islamic State forced them
to grow after seizing large swathes of northern and western Iraq in a bid to
build a modern-day caliphate. Tufts of dark facial hair littered the road under
one of the vehicle's side-view mirrors.
"It was
hell," said Abdul Bassit, describing life under the hardline Sunni
Islamists. Smoking was forbidden and carried a punishment of 70 lashes, he
said. Dress was strictly regulated, cell phones prohibited and women prevented
from leaving the house.
The villagers
said Islamic State fighters did not speak to them much and they avoided contact
as much as possible. Most of them were Iraqi, they said, but one man recalled
meeting a Kuwaiti fighter.
"We would
see them in the mosque for the five daily prayers, but that was about it,"
he said. The fighters were either killed in Monday's clashes with government
forces or fled deeper into Islamic State-held territory.
Ahmed Kamel,
31, said the number of Islamic State fighters inside Mosul - estimated by the
Iraqi military at up to 6,000 - was small but their insurgent tactics would
make it difficult for the 30,000-strong Iraqi force to rout them.
"It could
take one month, one year, 10 days," he said of the offensive. "I
don't know, but I hope it is 10 days."
Iraq's elite
counter-terrorism forces, which are spearheading the offensive, are now just a
few kilometers from Mosul. Beyond Tub Zawa, only Bazwaia village and some
military camps separate them from the city's eastern limits.
But the troops
paused their advance on Tuesday, a senior commander told Reuters, waiting for
the other U.S.-backed forces to close in from the south and northeast.
While the
soldiers regrouped, one villager recounted his experiences of life under the
Sunni militants now preparing to battle for the city.
Sixty eight
year-old Ghazi Fathi, sitting alone in the driver's seat of a beat up sedan,
raised his stained white galabiya to reveal about a dozen crude stitches above
his waist and a large bandage on the left side of his abdomen.
"They
tortured me," he said of Islamic State, without explaining how. "They
asked me if I was sheltering my Shi'ite neighbors and when I told them 'no'
they accused me of lying."
Fathi,
writhing in pain on Tuesday, called through his car window for medical aid and
water but a peshmerga guard said he had to wait until security clearance was
complete. That process did not appear to have started as the sun began to set.
Reuters
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