Last stand in Mosul razed 5000 homes
IRAQ: All that remains of Mosul’s Old City is a grey wasteland. Bombed from the air, shelled and booby-trapped on the ground, the area has been levelled by a five-month war to root out Islamic State.
The effect of that battle as the jihadists made their last stand is clearly marked in before-and-after satellite photographs.
The Old City was too closely packed for green space – something that made the street fighting to clear it all the more gruelling. Dust-coloured blotches blur over neighbourhoods and street corners. In bomb zones, homes blend into one another when viewed from the air.
UN-Habitat, a United Nations settlements programme, used satellite imagery to calculate that 5000 homes in the Old City were destroyed in the fighting. That is a third of all its houses, and the number excludes those with merely ‘‘moderate damage’’.
In the rest of Mosul, about 8500 houses or other residential buildings were destroyed. The Old City covers 2.6 square kilometres, a fraction of the whole of Mosul.
When Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, began the battle to recapture the city in October he said it would be over by Christmas. In the end, the east side alone took until January. Even at the time, Iraqi officers and their American, British and other Western advisers said the other half would be more difficult: it was larger, more densely populated, more closely packed.
The aerial bombardment to retake west Mosul, which includes the Old City, started in February. The intensity of the defence grew as the most fanatical elements of the Isis resistance retreated inside the Old City.
According to a report published last week by Amnesty International, based on interviews with residents, Isis fighters in east Mosul knocked through walls to move from house to house, taking up sniper positions on rooftops.
In the Old City, they tunnelled between basements, presenting a more difficult target. They also shot hundreds of civilians who tried to escape, forcing others to stay as human shields.
Airwars, the monitoring group, said the number of civilian deaths from allied action could rise to more than 5900 in the west. The group’s upper estimate of deaths from allied action in the east was less than 1300.
Some residents are upset that so much focus has been on the destruction of the Old City rather than the rest of Mosul, which has recovered relatively quickly. In the east markets are already bustling and schools reopening.
Rasha Al Aqeedi, a political analyst from Mosul, said the landscape of the Old City was ‘‘very complicated’’. She added that some of Amnesty’s criticisms raised legitimate questions – most notably those concerning an incident in which more than 100 civilians died when the building they were sheltering in was bombed, apparently to take out two Isis snipers on the roof.
However, she added: ‘‘When the stories of Isis shooting civilians trying to escape began surfacing, most realised there was no way around the carnage.’’
– The Times