Do not retreat: IS chief Baghdadi in new ‘audio tape’

BAGHDAD:Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called on his fighters to resist as Iraqi forces were poised to enter the city of Mosul where he declared a “caliphate” two years ago.

“Do not retreat,” said a voice presented as belonging to him in an audio message released on Thursday by the IS-affiliated Al-Furqan media.

“This total war and the great jihad that the state of Islam is fighting today only increases our firm belief, God willing, and our conviction that all this is a prelude to victory. Holding your ground with honour is a thousand times easier than retreating in shame,” he said in the purpoted message, first in more than a year if authentic.

Baghdadi called on the population of Mosul’s Nineveh province to fight the “enemies of God” and for the suicide fighters to “turn the nights of the unbelievers into days, to wreak havoc in their land and make their blood flow as rivers.”

Rumours have abounded about the Iraqi jihadist leader’s health and movements but his whereabouts are unclear.

In June 2014, days after jihadist fighters swept across swathes of Iraq, he made a rare public appearance in Mosul and announced the creation of an Islamic “state” straddling Iraq and Syria.

The “caliphate” has been shrinking steadily since last year and Iraqi forces earlier this week reached Mosul, the jihadists’ last major stronghold in Iraq. The US-led coalition estimates there are 3,000 to 5,000 IS fighters inside the city but the final outcome of the battle appears to be in little doubt.

Whenever members of Islamic State’s Mosul vice squad find a woman without gloves, they pull out a pair of pliers.

What follows is just one of a wide range of punishments that the group - known in Arabic by its enemies as Daesh - metes out in its northern Iraqi stronghold.

“Daesh would squeeze the pliers on the skin of the woman hard,” said Firdos, a 15-year-old girl who has fled from the city in the last week. Firdos managed to escape such treatment herself, but she told Reuters that Islamic State has more ways of enforcing one of the many rules of its moral code - that women must not show their bare hands in public.

“The other penalty was we (women) would be whipped for not wearing gloves,” Firdos said in Al-Khazer, a town taken by Kurdish forces as part of an Iraqi offensive to regain Mosul. She, like others who have fled Islamic State’s grip, declined to give her last name for fear of reprisals against relatives still in Mosul, about 27 km away.

When IS captured Iraq’s second largest city in 2014, it promised that anyone who joined the Sunni militants’ cause would eventually earn a place in paradise. It told the people of predominantly Sunni Mosul it would eliminate Nuri al-Maliki, the then Iraqi prime minister accused of sectarian policies.