Mosul residents risking lives
MOSUL RESIDENTS RISK SNIPERS, BOMBS AND A BLEAK LIFE IN CAMPS
One million or more civilians face snipers, bombs and a bleak life in camps |
The first thing Musar Abd did when he escaped Daesh this week was grab a razor.
“I shaved this morning,” he said, smiling and pointing to his cheeks, smooth for the first time since Daesh militants began requiring long beards two years ago. “I became a young man again.”
When Iraqi federal policemen taking part in the offensive to reclaim Mosul from the terrorist group approached his village, Abd, 41, was elated to see them coming.
For Abd, escape was an imperative — he had informed to the Iraqi police about conditions in the city, he said. “All of the world knows what life was like under Daesh,” he said.
But there are 1 million or more other civilians still in the city, and as they begin taking up the decision of whether to flee or stay, they face increasing hazards. Aid groups and international agencies are racing to prepare the possibility that the trickle of civilians fleeing Mosul, like Abd, will soon become a flood.
Aid workers fear that as the fight moves to urban centres, it could force the sudden displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and they are stockpiling gas masks in case Daesh turns to chemical attacks. And despite the relief civilians are expressing as they flee the militants, the risk is considerable.
The government has been dropping leaflets, telling civilians to stay in their homes and urging young men to rise up and fight the militants once security forces approach.
Growing dilemma
As of Friday, with the fighting still on the city’s outskirts, most Mosul residents appeared to be hunkering down, US officials said. If that trend holds, they said, it could lessen the crunch on supplies and housing at the aid camps outside the city.
But the dilemma for civilians in Mosul will only grow more acute as fighting intensifies: stay, and risk having their families caught up in combat and air strikes or held as hostages by Daesh; or go, and risk sniper attacks and roadside bombs as they flee, followed by a bleak life in camps for displaced people for the foreseeable future.
Families and aid workers worry that Daesh will use civilians as human shields, as they did earlier this year in the fight for Fallujah. The United Nations said Friday that the group was holding 550 families as shields near Mosul.
Many of the displaced so far 5,640 people in the first days of fighting, the United Nations said - are from villages south of Mosul, in a region where the Iraqi army and the federal police are pushing north from a rear staging base in Qaiyara, where US soldiers are advising the Iraqis.
To get there, New York Times journalists drove south last week from Arbil, along cratered roads whose only traffic seemed to be flatbed trucks carrying military vehicles and pickup trucks full of government fighters. On the horizon off to the right the parched moonscape met a wall of black smoke from the oil wells Daesh has set alight as a cover from air strikes. Checkpoints, flying the flags of the Kurdish peshmerga, the Iraqi army and Shiite militias, lined the road.
At the base in Qayyara, a group of federal policeman grabbed their rifles, and we piled into their minivan for a tour of some of the villages. As we drove through the dusty towns, children waved and cheered, and the policemen tossed them water bottles.
As Iraqi forces advanced last week, their progress was slowed by suicide attacks and roadside bombs. Western diplomats and foreign leaders have warned that the fight for Mosul could be long and bloody, perhaps stretching into next year.
Some Iraqis from Mosul and the surrounding area, though, are predicting another scenario: that the residents of Mosul have become so disenchanted by the group’s brutal rule that at least some will rise up against Daesh.
“Believe me, if they attack Mosul all the youth will be with the Iraqi army,” said Umm Yihya, 46, who escaped Mosul about a week ago with her son and is now living in a sprawling tent encampment in Debaga, south of Arbil, the capital of the Kurdish region. “Even the women will fight against Daesh. They’ve treated us in a disgraceful way, and that generated a lot of hate against them.”
Afraid of Daesh
Others said a broad uprising among civilians against Daesh was unlikely. “They are afraid,” said Hussain Hassan, a man in his mid-70s who fled his village last week. “I can’t say they will rise up.”
While most civilians, he said, would welcome liberation, they have little confidence in the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. In his village, he said, just a handful of militants on motorbikes fought off a much larger force. “They were engaging all of the Iraqi forces, and the army couldn’t get in our village,” he said.
It has taken two years of training a demoralised army, backed up by the air cover and special forces of the world’s greatest powers, for Iraq to mount an offensive to recapture Mosul from Daesh.
Almost week into the US-led onslaught, many of those running the campaign say the battle to retake the city could be long and hard. But they have also identified what they think is a chink in the militants’ armour.
If local fighters in Mosul can be persuaded to drop their allegiance to Daesh, there is a chance that the battle can be brought to a more speedy conclusion, and that could have major implications for the future of Iraq.
Against a background of splits and rebellions in the Daesh ranks in Mosul, some opposing commanders believe that a successful attempt to win over those local fighters could mean the battle lasts only weeks rather than months.
Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city, is where Daesh leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared his so-called caliphate in 2014, after his alliance between millenarian Islamists and veteran officers from the disbanded army of Saddam Hussain roared back into Iraq from bases they set up in the mayhem of Syria’s war. Five Iraqi army divisions melted away before militants numbered in hundreds.
Fractured nation
Now the battle to retake Mosul pits an unwieldy coalition of a 30,000-strong Iraqi regular force backed by the US and Europeans, alongside Kurdish and Shiite militias, against militants who have exploited the Sunni community’s sense of dispossession in Iraq and betrayal in Syria.
Not just its outcome but the political sensitivity with which this battle is handled could determine the future of Daesh, as well as the shape of this part of the Middle East.
Daesh fighters, estimated at between 4,000 and 8,000, have rigged the city with explosives, mined and boobytrapped roads, built oil-filled moats they can set alight, dug tunnels, and trenches and have shown every willingness to use Mosul’s up to 1.5 million civilians as human shields.
Daesh would seem to have a plentiful supply of suicide bombers, launching them in scores of explosives-laden trucks against Kurdish Peshmerga fighters converging on Mosul from the east and northeast, and Iraqi forces, spearheaded by counter-terrorism units, advancing from the south and southwest.
“Mosul will be a multimonth endeavour. This is going to take a long time,” a senior US official said in Iraq.
Karim Sinjari, Interior Minister in the self-governing Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq, said Daesh would put up a fierce fight because of Mosul’s symbolic value as capital of its selfproclaimed caliphate.
“If Mosul is finished the caliphate they announced is finished. If they lose in Mosul, they will have no place, just Raqqa (in Syria),” Sinjari said.
Adept at exploiting divisions among its enemies, last Friday’s dawn assault by Daesh on Kirkuk, for example, was not just an attempt to divert Iraqi and Kurdish forces and relieve pressure on the main front.
It was also intended to galvanise Sunni Arab opinion against the Kurds, whose Iraqi Peshmerga and Syrian Kurdish militia have fielded the most effective ground forces against Daesh.
That is why many of those invested in the battle for Mosul stress the need to break the cohesion of Daesh and the allegiance it has won or coerced among alienated Sunni, in Mosul and beyond. The opportunity is there, they say.
They believe that while foreign militants will fight to the finish to protect their last stronghold in Iraq, the Iraqi fighters, many from Mosul itself, may lay down their arms.
“Most of the (Daesh) fighters now are local tribal fighters.
They have some foreign fighters, they have some people from other parts of Iraq and Syria, but the majority are local fighters,” says a senior Kurdish military intelligence chief.
“If we can take this away from them, the liberation of Mosul is a job of a week or two weeks.”
Fissures are widening inside the Daesh camp, with Iraqi, Kurdish and Western sources reporting resistance in Mosul and a spate of attacks on its leaders.
Sinjari, also the KRG acting defence minister, says there is growing resentment against the group’s brutality.
Revolt in Daesh
“There is information that many people are revolting and carrying out attacks against IS [Daesh]. A number of Daesh members were killed on the streets at night,” Sinjari said. This was confirmed by the US official but could not be independently verified. It fits with accounts of a recent abortive uprising against Daesh, led by a former aide to Al Baghdadi, that ended with the execution of 58 Daesh dissidents.
The Mosul offensive will be the most important battle fought in Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003. What happens next will shape or break an already fractured Iraq. “There are growing concerns about fixing the political peace the day after liberating Mosul,” said Hoshyar Zebari, a top Iraqi politician and former finance minister.
“How will this multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian city ... be governed and run without communal conflict, without revenge killing, without a large displacement of people? That needs some political planning on how the city will be governed. It should have a strong representative governance in the city.” But the battle against radical Islamists in the region will not end with the liberation of Mosul.
“Mosul will not be the end of Daesh or the end of extremism in this region. They will go back to more asymmetric warfare. We will see suicide attacks inside Kurdistan, inside Iraqi cities and elsewhere.”