Executions in Mosul as laws of war ‘collapse’
IRAQ: Under Mosul’s Fifth Bridge, which crosses the Tigris just north of the old city, tanks and armoured vehicles are lined up in reserve.
Angry shouting alerts the men resting on their machines to a throng of soldiers storming past - a man, stripped down to a pair of baggy trousers and his hands tied, is being pushed along.
One soldier holds him by the hair, as another kicks him from behind. The captive pleads for mercy. He is led up the road to a makeshift detention centre, set up to screen those fleeing Mosul’s old city. The old city was the final holdout for Islamic State fighters and their families as they mounted a last stand before the city was declared liberated last week. Wives of some of the Isis fighters launched suicide attacks as Iraqi forces approached. Iraqi soldiers have come to consider anyone still trapped inside the old city as the enemy.
‘‘All of the men in there are with Daesh, and most of the families are Daesh families,’’ said Sergeant Fazel, a soldier of the Iraqi 9th Armoured Division, using the Arabic acronym for Isis.
As a result, soldiers’ treatment of civilians has become rougher, and little help is afforded to the emaciated women, children and the elderly.
Any man of fighting age is suspected to be a jihadist trying to escape, with mounting reports of swift executions behind the front lines, as a human rights group warns that adherence to the laws of war have ‘‘collapsed’’.
The fate of the man led away from Mosul’s Fifth Bridge is unknown. But last week The Sunday Telegraph witnessed another man, bushy-bearded and haggard, being detained by soldiers, believed to be Iraqi counter-terrorism troops, near the ruins of the notorious al-Nouri mosque.
His shirt and jeans hung awkwardly from his lean frame and his hands were tied. His head bowed, he walked along without protest, before the soldiers pushed him into a shop in a bombed-out house. Shots rang out, and the soldiers emerged to walk back to their position at the front line. Inside the building, the man lay dead on a bed of rubble, a bullet wound in his forehead, his hands still tied together.
Human Rights Watch says there have been ‘‘numerous’’ eyewitness accounts of torture and extrajudicial killings. A recent video filmed in the area appeared to show a group of soldiers severely beating a detainee before throwing him from a cliff on to the riverbank and shooting him. The corpse of another man already lay there.
In May, Iraqi photographer Ali Arkady risked his life to document the widespread torturing and killing of Isis suspects by an elite Iraqi unit.
But observers say the violence has become more brazen recently. - Telegraph Group