PM hails ‘great victory’ over militants
IRAQ: Dressed in the black cap and fatigues of the Iraqi counterterrorism forces, a jubilant Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi arrived in Mosul yesterday to declare victory over Isis in the city, even as fighting continued to rout the last jihadist diehards from the Old City.
On day 266 of fighting to recapture the city, Abadi shared a photo of himself shaking the hand of an Iraqi officer on the runway of a nearby airbase.
‘‘The commander in chief of the armed forces Haider al-Abadi arrived in the liberated city of Mosul and congratulated the heroic fighters and Iraqi people for the great victory,’’ his office said in a statement.
Earlier, counter-terrorism forces were pictured planting the Iraqi flag on the western bank of the Tigris River after advancing through the Old City, where diehards of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have made their last stand.
It marked the end of the fight that lasted nearly nine months - longer than the Battle for Stalingrad - and put an end to the terror group’s three year rule over Iraq’s second city.
Isis stormed into Mosul in June 2014. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the group’s leader, proclaimed a caliphate in the city shortly afterwards.
While the group still controls the district of Hawija north of Baghdad and remote areas of Anbar province and desert close to the Syrian border, the loss of its Iraqi capital deals a death blow to the group’s claims to a caliphate.
Fighting continued around a 50m by 200m wedge of territory in the Al-Maidan area of Mosul’s Old City, where an unknown number of Isis militants continued to hold civilians as human shields.
Other militants are believed to have escaped with fleeing civilians in recent days. Some have detonated suicide belts as they reach Iraqi military screening points, while others have attempted to swim the Tigris River to escape.
Already the country has begun celebrating what is being hailed by Abadi as ‘‘the end of the fake Daesh state’’.
In Baghdad, carloads of cheering men waving Iraqi flags drove through the capital celebrating. In Mosul, elated federal policemen filmed each other singing and dancing to patriotic music, weapons and smartphones held aloft.
But with much of west Mosul devastated, many Mosul residents would have little to celebrate. Exhausted families continued emerging from the ruins yesterday, many mourning relatives recently killed in the fighting.
In much of the destroyed Old City, the stench of rot emanates from the rubble - coming from entombed bodies which may never receive a proper burial. Already aid agencies are warning that an extremely traumatised population will require support for months if not years to come.
The battle to retake Mosul began last October, with coordinated attacks by Kurdish Peshmerga from the east and Iraqi army units pushing up from the south. Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) were the first soldiers to enter the city, and were responsible for retaking most districts of east Mosul, which was declared fully liberated in January.
With ISOF units depleted by casualties, Iraqi federal police and army units carried out most of the fighting in the west. Many of these units proved more poorly trained, relying on air strikes that caused high civilian casualties and extensive damage to the city.
The fighting reached its brutal apogee in the Old City, where a few hundred Isis diehards made their last stand, effectively holding an estimated 100,000 starving civilians hostage during the last weeks of fighting.
The United States department of defence estimated ISOF casualties at 40 per cent, according to a budget for training and equipping counter-Isil forces produced in May. The civilian casualties monitoring group Airwars believes that between 900 and 1200 civilians were killed in bombing by the US-led coalition, and more by Iraqi shelling. Iraqi civil defence officials have suggested that up to 4,000 bodies may still be lying buried under rubble.
- Telegraph Group