ISIL MARCHING PEOPLE INTO MOSUL TO USE AS SHIELDS
Hundreds taken from homes at gunpoint
QAYYARAH, IRAQ • Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant militants have been going door to door in villages south of Mosul, ordering people at gunpoint on a kilometres-long trek into the city and using them as human shields as the extremists prepare to defend it from Iraqi forces, according to residents swept up in the forced evacuations.
Witnesses described scenes of chaos over the past week as hundreds of people were ordered out of their homes without having time to pack and driven north across the Nineveh plains toward the heavily fortified city, where ISIL has been preparing for a climactic showdown.
“ISIL took all of us from our homes at gunpoint and told us they were taking us with them to Mosul,” Ahmed Bilal Harish said Wednesday. “They said if you don’t come with us you’re an unbeliever.”
He said he and his family were only able to escape when a volley of airstrikes caused the fighters to scatter during the 40-kilometre forced march from their home in the town of Shura to Mosul.
“We had two choices: We could be killed by ISIL or die along the way, so we ran,” he said. The family is now living in a camp for those displaced by the fighting in an area under government control. Iraqi forces moved more than 1,000 people out of villages near Mosul that were recently retaken for their safety, officials said Wednesday.
Other Shura residents also described being forcibly relocated to Mosul by ISIL militants over the weekend. The militants only gave people a few minutes to leave and said any stragglers risked being punished for hiding out and trying to join the Iraqi security forces.
Brig.-Gen. Alaa Mehsin, of the Iraqi army’s 15th Division, said the ISIL militants were taking hundreds of civilians as human shields and had planted explosive booby-traps to slow the advancing troops.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says ISIL fighters have been sweeping through the hardscrabble towns and villages to the south of Mosul over the past week, killing those they fear may rise up against them and forcibly relocating others.
In one village south of Mosul, Iraqi forces found the bodies of 70 residents who had been gunned down, and ISIL appears to have killed 50 former Iraqi police officers it was holding in a building near the city, Rupert Colville, a spokesman for the UN agency, told reporters in Geneva.
Iraqi forces have been pushing toward Mosul from several directions since the operation began Oct. 17.