Mosul bombing turned homes into graves
MOSUL: Aya Abosh found her sister in the house where she spent her final moments, trapped with her boys as shells fell from the sky and caved in the roof.
They were lying there, in the detritus of floral blankets and twisted railings.
“Hammoudi,” Abosh said, somehow recognising her 6-year-old nephew, Mahmoud. Recovery workers toiled around her, struggling to find a zipper on a body bag, then straining to wrap remains disfigured by trauma, time and sun.
This was the site of Iraq’s landmark military victory just weeks ago that ended the Islamic State extremist group’s wrenching occupation of Mosul and crippled the militants’ ambitions for the Middle East, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said.
There were noisy, flag-waving celebrations, even as the prime minister reminded the nation that there had been “blood and sacrifices”, too.
Only now is the terrible cost of the victory emerging, in quarters of the Old City ground to rubble by airstrikes, shelling and suicide bombs. For under the barrage were thousands of homes packed with families. Hundreds of the houses were transformed into graves.
With the rough estimates of the dead from the neighbourhood reaching the thousands, relatives have angrily questioned the way the battle was fought by Iraqi forces and their partners in the US-led military coalition, which carried out air strikes in support. The concerns over civilian casualties have become more urgent as US-backed forces redouble their efforts to defeat the Islamic State in the militants’ final redoubts in Iraq and Syria.
Time after time in Mosul, civilians were killed in a similar, disturbing pattern: Islamic State militants kidnapped families as human shields in houses that served as the fighters’ garrisons. Snipers took up positions on rooftops, firing at Iraqi troops or coalition planes. Then the houses were bombed, sometimes by artillery or air strikes and with little apparent regard for the people inside, relatives and survivors said.
Basements used for shelter became tombs.
No one has said yet how many died here. Even estimates are a secret, closely held by a government sensitive to the charge that it attacked the neighbourhood with terrifying force and not enough care. But there are grim clues.
At the local morgue, nearly 900 names are on a record of bodies pulled mostly from the Old City since June 24, an official there said. Civil defence workers have a list of 300 locations where bodies are waiting to be recovered, and they have reached only a little more than a third of those sites.
In some of the houses, there is one body. In others, there are dozens.
Hundreds of other victims were buried by their relatives during the fighting in gardens or makeshift cemeteries dug in empty lots. The “refrigerators” at the main morgue in Mosul two tractor-trailers parked on a lawn are full.
“Based on our figures,” said one Iraqi official, talking off the record, “there are not enough refrigerators in all of Iraq.”