Exhausted and mourning, families emerge from Mosul ruins
Struggle over Iraq’s future intensifies
MOSUL: With the battle to retake Iraq’s Mosul from Daesh drawing to an end, dozens of women and their children emerge exhausted and griefstricken from the ruins.
Around 15 women and children huddle on a shaded pavement out of the scorching sun at the edge of the Old City, as automatic weapons fire and mortar rounds resound inside.
Iraqi forces fighting Daesh have brought them from the Al-Maidan area inside the city’s historic center, where militants are making a last stand ahead of an imminently expected defeat.
A young mother in her 20s crouches silently against a wall, dressed in a black robe and light blue scarf. Suddenly, she doubles up on the pavement, begging the nearest soldier to listen to her distress.
Only an hour earlier, she lost her seven-year-old son in a bombardment, just as she and her family prepared to leave the Old City after months of hiding from terrorists.
“There was nothing I could do,” she says, her face distorted with grief as her eldest daughter tries to wipe away her tears.
“Don’t cry, Mummy,” says the 10-yearold, whose burgundy dress is drenched in her little brother’s blood.
Fatima, a woman in her 50s, bursts into tears recounting her and her family’s ordeal over the past four months.
They hid “almost without food or water” in a basement watched by terrorists, she says, praying not to be hit in the fighting.
They emerged when their street seemed to have been retaken by Iraqi forces, seeing the sky for the first time in weeks as they hurried out of the area toward freedom.
But a sniper hit Fatima’s brother as BAGHDAD: Even after the recapture of Mosul, Daesh still holds significant territory in several Iraqi provinces and has the ability to carry out attacks in government-held areas.
Here are some of the key areas still controlled by the terrorists, the recapture and control of which pose political as well as military challenges:
A town located between Mosul and the Syrian border that had an estimated population of around 200,000 before Daesh seized it in the summer of 2014.
Tal Afar was a Shiite Muslim-majority enclave in the mostly Sunni Muslim area with an overwhelmingly Turkmen population before its capture by Daesh.
“Tal Afar itself is going to be a bit like Mosul, it’s going to be... sort of a quite conventional clearance operation,” said Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
But the issue of which forces will participate, they fled, and she has had no news of him since he was taken away in an ambulance.
Beside her, another woman cries, eyes lifted toward the sky and desperately chanting a man’s name. and who will control it after it is retaken, are potential sources of conflict.
“Shiite militia insistence on controlling the Turkmen (town) of Tal Afar juxtaposed with US and Turkish refusal to allow the militias to participate” are among the conditions that could lead to conflict in the future, said Patrick Martin of the Institute for the Study of War.
A town in Iraq’s Kirkuk that is the center of a large Daesh-held area in a province that is otherwise controlled by Kurdish forces.
Security forces entered an anti-government protest camp in the Hawijah area in April 2013, sparking clashes that killed dozens, a key event in a surge in violence in Iraq that culminated in a Daesh offensive that overran swathes of the country the following year.
“Political challenges are preventing the Hawijah operation from starting,” Martin said. “The convergence of Iraqi Kurdish
Liqaa was forced to leave her brother’s body behind after he too was shot down by a Daesh sniper.
Iraqi forces are fighting the last Daesh fighters inside Mosul, on the verge of retaking the city after three forces, who seek to control Kirkuk and its oil resources, Iraqi Shiite militias who seek to prevent Kurdish separatism and Iraqi government forces could lead to instability in recaptured Kirkuk,” he said.
Hawijah is “part of a threat complex that is an island of ungoverned space in the middle of north-central Iraq. And it’s a complicated, big, long-term problem,” Knights said.
He said clearing Hawijah will likely be left until last.
Daesh holds a string of territory along the Euphrates River valley in Anbar province, including the Al-Qaim area on the Syrian border.
While Iraqi forces have recaptured Ramadi and Fallujah, the two main population centers in Anbar, this territory closer to the border with Syria will be difficult to defend once recaptured. years of militant rule.
Around 250 displaced people arrive from the Old City on Saturday alone, an employee of a local non-governmental organization says, asking to remain anonymous.
“A quarter are wounded, mostly by mortar rounds or sniper fire from jihadists targeting fleeing civilians,” the employee says.
Among the women, some watch out for their men, several of whom are in February 2004 and detained at the Camp Bucca facility, he was still very much a second or third-tier terrorist.
The US prison in southern Iraq was where he started showing signs of the leader he is now.
He was released at the end of 2004 for lack of evidence. Iraqi security services arrested him twice subsequently, in 2007 and 2012, but let him go because they did not know who he was.
In 2005, he pledged allegiance to Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the brutal leader of one of Daesh’s many previous incarnations.
Al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006 and Al-Baghdadi took over from his successor, who was also eliminated, in 2010.
He revived the fortunes of Iraq’s struggling Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), turning it into the independent Daesh, expanding into Syria in 2013 and then launching its sweeping offensive in Iraq in 2014.
Al-Baghdadi grew up in a family divided between a religious clan and another of officers loyal to Saddam being screened by Iraqi fighters tasked with making sure no terrorist escapes among the fleeing civilians.
But others, already widows, no longer have anyone to wait for.
Soldiers and first aid workers hand out biscuits, water and orange juice to the children, who often arrive dehydrated.
On the pavement, a tiny girl of around three years old, brown hair tousled and wearing a turquoise dress, stands alone, clutching a half empty plastic water bottle.
“Whose child is this?” shouts a soldier. But around her, the women are too distraught to reply.
Among the women who have fled their homes, those without relatives to stay with will be directed toward one of the camps for the displaced around the city.
Around 915,000 residents have run from their homes since the start of the battle for Mosul in October, the UN said two days before, including 700,000 who have yet to return.
Not far off, Samira, a mother in her 20s, holds close her two daughters, terrified and covered in dirt.
She cradles her last born, a motionless baby with a grey complexion.
Daesh “would beat us as soon as we tried to leave. And outside, there was bombardment. It was terrifying,” Samira says.
Her infant suddenly starts crying, much to the relief of onlooking aid workers.
Aside from Mosul, across the border in Syria a battle is raging to dislodge Daesh from Raqqa, the second capital of its self-declared caliphate. Fighting will push down the Euphrates valley to Deir Ezzor, Daesh’s last big urban stronghold.
But the fall of Mosul also exposes ethnic and sectarian fractures that have plagued Iraq for more than a decade. Hussein’s secular Baath party.
Years later, his masterstroke as a terrorist leader was arguably to incorporate the ex-Baathists his predecessors had either fought or ignored into his organization.
It gave his leadership the military legitimacy he personally lacked and formed a solid backbone for the future Daesh, whose extremist religious propaganda was combined with formidable guerrilla efficiency.
Uncharismatic and an average orator, Al-Baghdadi was described by his repudiated ex-wife Saja Al-Dulaimi, who now lives in Lebanon, as a “normal family man” who was good with children.
Baghdadi is thought to have had three wives, Asma Al-Kubaysi, Isra Al-Qaysi — from Iraq and Syria — and another, more recent, from the Gulf.
He has also been accused of having repeatedly raped girls and women he kept as sex slaves, including a pre-teen Yazidi girl and the US aid worker Kayla Mueller who was subsequently killed.