Iraqi army ‘traps’ ISIL in Mosul’s Old City

ERBIL // Iraq’s army said it encircled ISIL’s stronghold in the Old City of Mosul yesterday after taking over an area to the north of the densely populated historic district. The army’s 9th armoured division seized Al Shifaa district, which includes the city’s main hospitals, alongside the western bank of the Tigris river, the military said.

The fall of Shifaa means the Old City in the eastern half of Mosul is surrounded by USbacked government forces, deployed north, west, south and east, across the river.

The battle for the Old City is becoming the deadliest in the eight-month US-backed offensive to capture Mosul, ISIL’s de facto capital in Iraq and the largest city the group came to control in the country.

Aid organisations expressed alarm as more than 100,000 civilians, half of whom are children, were trapped in their homes with little food, water or medicine and no electricity.

The International Committee of the Red Cross on Monday said sick and wounded civilians escaping through ISIL lines were dying in “high numbers”. The militants are moving stealthily in the Old City’s maze of alleyways and narrow streets, through holes dug between houses, fighting back the advancing troops with sniper and mortar fire, booby traps and suicide bombers.

They have also covered many streets with cloths to obstruct air surveillance, making it difficult for the advancing troops to hit them without a risk to civilians.

The Iraqi army estimates the number of ISIL fighters at no more than 300, down from nearly 6,000 in the city when the battle of Mosul started on October 17. The fall of Mosul would mark the end of the Iraqi half of the caliphate that ISIL leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared three years ago and which once covered much of Iraq and Syria.