Islamic State
has arrested dozens of Mosul shop owners accused of raising food prices in the
nearly besieged city, to tamp down discontent as a U.S.-backed offensive closes
in on the group's last major stronghold in Iraq, residents said on Monday.
The arrests
took place on Sunday morning in Bursa, a commercial district in the western
part of the city, said a witness who asked not be identified as Islamic State
punishes with death those caught communicating with the outside world.
About 30 shop
owners in the area were arrested and taken away blindfolded to unknown
destinations, he said.
The Sunni
hardline group is relentlessly cracking down on people who could help the
biggest ground offensive in Iraq since the U.S-led invasion that toppled Saddam
Hussein in 2003.
Most of the
people executed previously in Mosul were former police and army officers,
suspected of disloyalty or plotting rebellions against the militants' rule. The
arrest of the shop owners is meant as a warning to retailers to refrain from
price hikes that would cause unrest in the city.
Some 100,000
Iraqi government troops, Kurdish security forces and mainly Shi'ite militiamen
are participating in the assault on Mosul, with air and ground support from a
U.S.-led international military coalition.
Six weeks into
the campaign, troops have so far entered about a quarter of the city on its
eastern outskirts, but are moving slowly to avoid civilian casualties and have
yet to enter the half of the city on the west bank of the Tigris River.
More than a
million people are still believed to live in parts of Mosul under the control
of the fighters, who seized the largest city in northern Iraq as part of a
lightning advance across a third of the country in 2014.
Retail prices
rose in Mosul last week after Popular Mobilisation, a force of mainly
Iranian-backed pro-government Shi'ite paramilitaries, cut the road linking the
Iraqi and Syrian parts of the "caliphate", Mosul's main supply route.
The Shi'ite
groups are attacking militants deployed between Mosul and Tal Afar, 60
kilometers (40 miles) to the west, trying to complete Mosul's encirclement,
with the army and Kurdish security forces controlling access from the other
three sides.
'1,000 MILITANTS
DEAD'
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.
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.
Iraqi special
forces have killed nearly 1,000 militants so far, Major General Abdul Ghani
al-Asadi, a commander of elite counter-terrorism troops told Reuters.
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.
A Reuters
correspondent in eastern Mosul saw civilians fleeing fighting in one of the
districts.
"Daesh
fighters are going around on foot from house to house while the army fights
them," said a man called Bashar.
"All
civilians are leaving the area, shops are closed," he said, standing next
to his two veiled wives, seven children and 70 year old mother.
In the nearby
Aden district, recently recaptured by the elite counter terrorism troops,
people came out of their house to greet officers, the Reuters correspondent
reported.
"We are
so glad that Daesh is gone," said a retired civil servant standing in
front of his house, referring to Islamic State by an acronym.
"We will
stay here but we haven't had water or electricity for two weeks," he said,
echoing a general concern among residents about shortages adding to their
hardship.
Reuters
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