Hanged from posts: Rescued ‘human shields’ tell of Mosul horror
Fear and hunger are driving an ever-growing number of Iraqi civilians into a camp in Hammam al-Alil, where they share tales of deadly violence and jihadist tyranny in Mosul.
Some arrive at the displacement camp, the largest in Mosul, on foot, but most are crammed into buses and trucks, relieved and exhausted. Half a million people are currently displaced as a result of the massive seven-month-old offensive to retake Iraq’s second city from the Islamic State group.
Thursday saw what the Norwegian Refugee Council said was the biggest single-day displacement since the start of the operation, with around 20,000 fleeing neighbourhoods of west Mosul.
“I feel safe, I did not think I would get out of there alive,” said Shams Hassan, a woman in her forties who reached the camp on Friday with 16 members of her family. She is from the Al-Faruq neighbourhood of Mosul’s Old City and lost track of the number of times she and her relatives had to change neighbourhoods in recent months.
“They always wanted us to be in front of them to use us as human shields. They would come to tell us to change houses,” she said.
“We would find ourselves in the middle of shelling and car bombs. One of the houses we lived in was struck by a mortar round, it collapsed on us and I was wounded by shrapnel. I had to be carried,” she said.
A large population remains in Mosul’s Old City, where ISIS appears to have concentrated most of its remaining resources. Some estimates say 250,000 civilians are still trapped.
Human shields have become a central feature of the vastly outnumbered jihadists’ defence and ISIS has stopped at nothing to deter people from escaping.
“Those who tried to flee were executed in the streets and their bodies hung from posts,” Shams Hassan said.
Her mother, who reached Hammam al-Alil a few weeks earlier, sat next to her, her gaze lost in the distance. “Daesh would take our food. They would come with guns and take our clothes too,” she said.
Trapped residents reached by AFP inside the areas still controlled by ISIS have warned recently that hunger was beginning to kill more people than the intense fighting itself.
There is no clean water left to drink and even unclean water is hard to come by. People are boiling paper and cartons to fill their stomachs.
“A bottle of oil was 50,000 dinars (around US$40), a can of tomatoes was 50,000 dinars too. Flour was 5,000 dinars. We ate some and fell sick. We haven’t showered the kids in two months, they have lice,” said Shams Hassan.
Having moved countless times, they eventually managed to escape when the Iraqi security forces reached their neighbourhood and escorted them out through holes that both sides have punched in walls in people’s homes to move up and down blocks undetected. In the dusty chaos engulfing the entrance of the camp, where new arrivals are screened and in most cases subsequently dispatched to other locations, one man cried in despair.
“We fled death only to face death here... Take us home.” — AFP