Liberation from militants leaves devastation in Mosul
MOSUL, Iraq — There was a smell of death in Mosul’s Old City when Ayman Hashem came back this week to see what happened to his home. His neighbourhood was unrecognizable.
“All that’s left is rubble and the bodies of families trapped underneath,” the 23-year-old said. He flipped through photos on his phone, showing picture after picture of wreckage. His own house was “cut in half,” he said. He had to cover his nose with his T-shirt because of the smell of buried, rotting bodies.
Iraq’s U.S.-backed forces wrested Mosul from the Islamic State group at the cost of enormous destruction. The nearly nine-month fight culminated with a crescendo of devastation — the blasting of the historic Old City to root out the deeply dug-in militants.
Nearly a third of the Old City — more than 5,000 buildings — was damaged or destroyed in the final three weeks of bombardment up to July 8, according to a survey by UN Habitat using satellite imagery.
Across the city, 10,000 buildings were damaged over the course of the war, the large majority in western Mosul, the scene of the most intense artillery, airstrikes and fighting during the past five months. The survey only covers damage visible in satellite photos, meaning the real number is likely higher.
The population, once numbering three million, is battered and exhausted, with hundreds of thousands displaced. Without a swift campaign to rebuild Mosul, aid and rights groups warn the current humanitarian crisis will balloon and resentment will likely give way to extremism, undermining the victory.
“If the western half is ignored it will produce a social disaster and this social disaster will create bigger destruction if it’s not addressed,” said Khatab Mohammed al-Najjar, a resident of eastern Mosul who watched the Old City burn from across the Tigris River during the operation.
“West Mosul produced Daesh, and it is very possible it may produce a new Daesh,” he said, referring to west Mosul’s historically more religious and traditional residents. He used the Arabic acronym for ISIL.
When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi declared victory in Mosul Monday, he pledged reconstruction would begin soon.
But his government still struggles to finance day-to-day workings of the state amid low oil prices.
Thousands of Mosul families have been left without a home. Schools have been levelled, utility grids wrecked, highways pounded into broken dirt roads.
All five of the city’s bridges spanning the Tigris River have been damaged.
The main hospital complex where a battle raged for more than a month is a burned out shell. Mosul’s airport looks like a derelict parking lot, boobytrapped with explosives by fleeing ISIL fighters.
In eastern Mosul, the destruction was less intense. More than 160,000 of the 176,000 people who fled the east have returned, according to the UN Residents have begun rebuilding homes, shops have reopened, and demining is underway.
But west of the Tigris, neighbourhoods have been rendered into ghost towns.
There, coalition strikes killed some 5,805 civilians between Feb. 19 and June 19, according to Airwars, a London-based monitoring group tracking civilian deaths resulting from coalition actions.
Fewer than a tenth of the more than 730,000 people who fled western Mosul have filtered back.