IS lost most land it held, says Iraq

BAGHDAD, April 11, (Agencies): Islamic State has lost most of the territory it has held in Iraq since 2014, an Iraqi military spokesman said on Tuesday.

At the height of its power, the militant group controlled about 40 percent of Iraq, joint operations command spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told a news conference.

That area has been whittled down to about 6.8 percent of Iraqi territory after extensive military operations, which are still going on in the city of Mosul, he said.

Islamic State militants still control the towns of Qaim, Tal Afar and Hawija in Iraq, as well as Raqqa, their de-facto capital in Syria.

The coalition battling Islamic State is made up of tens of thousands of members of the Iraqi security forces, led by the army, and thousands of Shi’ite volunteers, many from militia groups, commonly referred to as the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU).

The United States and other Western countries have assisted with air support, intelligence and equipment, Rasool said.

The battle for Mosul, one of Iraq’s largest cities, began last October and the outcome will likely determine whether Iraq’s various sects can work together to keep the country from fracturing.

The eastern half of the city is now completely under the control of Iraqi security forces, Rasool said. But the push against Islamic State in Western Mosul is bogged down with Iraqi security forces fighting in a warren of small streets in the old part of the city.

The federal police said in a statement on Tuesday they have been reinforcing their positions in Western Mosul in preparation for a push on the al-Nuri Mosque where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate in 2014.

Islamic State has used hundreds of car bombs along with drones rigged with explosives in Mosul. Its fighters have pulled civilians into the conflict by placing snipers in residential areas, using civilians as human shields and executing those who try to escape, coalition spokesman Col John Dorrian said at the news conference.

Dorrian said the fight in Western

Mosul had been tough but said Islamic State fighters had no escape.

“Do not lose sight of the fact that even though the fighting is going to be very hard, this enemy is completely surrounded,” Dorrian said. “They aren’t going anywhere.”

The babies cry with hunger but are so severely malnourished that doctors treating them at a hospital in Iraq would make their condition worse if they fed them enough to stop the pangs.

Many of the starving infants are from Mosul, where war between Islamic State militants and Iraqi forces is taking a heavy toll on several hundred thousand civilians trapped inside the city.

A new, specialist ward was opened recently to deal with the growing number of children from Mosul showing signs of malnutrition as the conflict grinds on — most of them less than six-months-old.

That means they were born around the time Iraqi forces severed Islamic State’s last major supply route from Mosul to Syria, besieging the militants inside the city, but also creating acute shortages of food.

“Normally nutritional crises are much more common in Africa and not in this kind of country,” said pediatrician Rosanna Meneghetti at the hospital, which is run by aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Qayyara, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Mosul. “We did not anticipate this”.

So far, the number of cases recorded is below the level considered critical but it nonetheless highlights the hardship faced by civilians who are effectively being held hostage by Islamic State.

Iraqi forces backed by a US-led coalition have retaken most of the city but are struggling to dislodge the militants from several districts in the west, including the Old City.

Residents who have managed to escape say there is almost nothing to eat but flour mixed with water and boiled wheat grain.

What little food remains is too expensive for most residents to afford, or kept for Islamic State members and their supporters.

In the ward, a team of doctors monitors the babies’ progress in grams, feeding them a special peanut-based paste that will gradually accustom them to eating and increase their weight.

On one bed lies a six-month-old boy weighing 2.4 kg — less than half the median weight for an infant of that age.