Civilians flee Iraq battle
U.N. says nearly 200 civilians executed, others used as shields
IRBIL, Iraq — As security forces bear down on Mosul, the Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields, and the United Nations said the militants may have executed nearly 200 people. To the east, near the Kurdish-controlled city of Kirkuk, Sunni Arabs who fled there to escape violence are being forcibly displaced as local officials worry about terrorist sleeper cells.
The toll of an intensifying war does not end there: A sulfur plant set on fire by the Islamic State has sent dozens of people for treatment for respiratory problems, and several journalists have been hurt, and two killed, covering the fighting.
Just 10 days into the longawaited offensive to retake Mosul from the Islamic State, the campaign has unleashed a fresh set of horrors across a wide stretch of the country. Although the government’s military operation itself is largely meeting its goals, the turmoil surrounding it is a sign of just how difficult it would be to secure a lasting peace across Iraq’s many divisions.
The human toll and factional distrust are early examples of the complex humanitarian crisis that many believed would unfold once the fight to oust the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, from its last major Iraqi stronghold began in earnest.
U.N. officials said Tuesday that Islamic State fighters had killed close to 200 people, including civilians and children, in and around Mosul in the past week. Among them were said to have been 50 former Iraqi policemen held in a building outside Mosul on Sunday, Rupert Colville, the spokesman for the U.N. human rights high commissioner, told journalists in Geneva.
The statements coming from Geneva track broadly with what local Iraqi officials and residents said in recent days as the military operation around Mosul intensified.
Colville said that in one case, several women and children, including a 4-year-old, who were being held as human shields by Islamic State fighters were suddenly gunned down by the militants, possibly because they were lagging behind the group.
He also said that last week the Islamic State was reported to have executed 15 civilians in the village of Safina, about 28 miles south of Mosul, supposedly to terrify other residents.
“ISIS has lost hundreds of its members from airstrikes when they withdraw, so now they are forcibly displacing the residents of villages they are leaving and using them as human shields,” said Abdul Satar, a former Iraqi army general.