THE BLOODBATH BEGINS

Mustard gas. Truck bombs. Trenches full of oil. And a million civilians being used as human shields. How ISIS will unleash hell in defence of their last Iraqi stronghold

RISKING a death sentence for talking to the outside world, the man on the end of the line spoke with quiet authority, his voice a mixture of hope and dread. A once-prosperous trader in Mosul — Iraq’s thirdlargest city — he had spent the past two years praying for the reign of Islamic State to end. Now, with a massive force of troops in a U.S.-led coalition massing for an all-out assault to regain Mosul from its hated new rulers, he admitted he may not survive the battle to come.

‘ISIS has been rigging all of Mosul with explosives, and forcing people to leave their neighbourhoods on the outskirts to go deeper into the city,’ he said last week, warning that the entire populace could become human shields. ‘But do you know what? We don’t care any more. We just want rid of these gangsters once and for all.’

Seldom has a mission of ‘liberation’ carried such a risk of carnage. In the coming days, Mosul will see the world’s biggest battle against ISIS to date, as more than 30,000 Iraqi troops, backed by American and British airpower and special forces, try to oust the jihadists from their main Iraqi stronghold.

Months of blood-soaked street fighting lie ahead, potentially turning the ancient city into a kind of Arab Stalingrad, the city that suffered such devastation as Russia and Germany grappled for supremacy in World War II.

As I will explain, Mosul has a totemic significance for ISIS. And, chillingly, its leaders view the city’s million-strong population as its biggest and best means of defence.

This is the reason for the terror group’s frenzied activity in recent weeks around Mosul’s outskirts.

It has dug trenches which have been filled with oil, and is setting this alight both as a defence against infantry and to disrupt attacks from the sky. It has erected concrete barriers and built sand berms or defensive walls.

Other reports suggest bridges that connect the two areas of Mosul on either side of the River Tigris have been mined, and that ISIS has forced women and children on to the tops of taller buildings to discourage air strikes. The idea is partly to keep the enemy out. But it is also to keep Mosul’s innocent civilians in.

A lucky few people have escaped in recent weeks by bribing their way past checkpoints — ISIS zealots are not above backhanders — but most remain trapped and will be shot if they are caught trying to flee.

Once the fighting starts in earnest, ISIS plans to blend in among the civilians, using innocent men, women and children as protection from coalition bombs and missiles.

In effect, a city almost the size of Glasgow is being held hostage by fanatics with no compunction about slaughtering captives when it suits their purpose.

Small wonder then that aid chiefs fear a catastrophe even by Iraq’s blood-soaked standards.

The operation ‘has the potential to be largest man-made disaster for many, many years,’ warned Bruno Geddo, the UN High Commissioner For Refugees’ top official for Iraq.

He said the agency was trying to provide tents, food and clinics for up to 700,000 people who may flee the fighting in the coming weeks, but that the consequences could be ‘apocalyptic’. By the end of October, there will be five new permanent camps set up to provide shelter.

Sitting on the Tigris as it winds through Iraq’s arid northern plains, Mosul is just 100 miles from the Syrian border, making it a strategic stronghold for Islamic State across both countries.

It was the scene of another famous last stand in 2003, when Saddam Hussein’s two fugitive sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed in a shootout with U.S. troops at a mansion in the suburbs. Visiting the city back then, I remember a quiet, laid-back place that seemed free and relatively at peace: restaurants were open late into the night, and whisky was freely available. That liberal Western lifestyle is a distant memory today under the iron fist of ISIS.

The jihadis conquered the city in a lightning strike back in June 2014, when convoys of masked, blackclad fighters roared across the border from Syria. Not only did they smash the 75,000-strong Iraqi army, which collapsed despite a decade of U.S. and British training, they

robbed Mosul’s central bank of half-a-billion dollars, netting themselves the biggest war chest in terrorist history.

The capture of the city marked the turning point in ISIS’s fortunes, transforming it from just another jihadist faction in Syria’s civil war into the global terror outfit it is known as today. The triumph symbolised the chaos spawned by the Western military invasion led by George W. Bush and Tony Blair that was not followed by a coherent plan for post-war reconstruction.

A month after ISIS invaded, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, ISIS’s blackbearded leader, declared himself leader of its new ‘Caliphate’ during prayers at Mosul’s Grand Mosque, and ever since the city has been one of the group’s most prized assets.

Christians in Mosul were given a brutal choice: to convert to extreme Islam, leave the city — or be killed.

Men were told to grow their beards. Acts of adultery were punished by stoning or the lash. Looters had their hands cut off. The Caliphate’s ‘subjects’ were flogged, tortured and beheaded for transgressions of Islamic edicts.

Women whose clothes failed to conceal their bodies faced the wrath of ‘biters’, all-female morality police armed with metal pincers that mark offenders for life by ripping out chunks of flesh.

Mobile phones and internet access were mostly cut off, and the few who still had access to either — businessmen who paid taxes to ISIS — such as the Mosul resident who spoke to the Mail last week, risked arrest and death as spies.

Yet Mosul’s notoriety now makes it a major symbolic prize for the U.S.led coalition of forces surrounding the city. American and British air power — such as the devastating Thunderbolt bombers, Typhoon jets and Apache attack helicopters — will play a role in the battle, as will SAS soldiers and U.S. special forces. But the ground fighting will be done mainly by Iraqi forces.

And much as that might limit the U.S. body-count, it may lead to the opposite for Mosul’s citizens, who face being ‘liberated’ by a force with a rough and often blunderbuss approach to urban warfare.

‘The Iraqis tend to be risk-averse and slow — relying on heavy use of artillery first to clear the territory before they come in,’ warned Professor Toby Dodge, an expert on the Iraqi military at the London School of Economics’ Middle East Centre. ‘They are often somewhat indiscriminate.’

Supporters of the operation point out that Baghdad will have its very best men on the job.

Rather than the badly led regular army divisions that melted away from Mosul two years ago, the 30,000-strong strike-force will be spearheaded by the ‘Golden Brigade’, an elite U.S.-trained counterterrorism force that has already squeezed ISIS out of the smaller Iraqi cities of Ramadi and Fallujah.

They will be backed in the air by coalition warplanes and drones, and British special forces will help call in targeted airstrikes, and also supervise hunts for high-value terrorists. Indeed, it was reported yesterday that Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi himself may be trapped in Mosul.

The Iraqi general commanding the operation said this week he plans to leave open a corridor for jihadi fighters to flee the city, in the hope that they will leave the citizens safely behind and the battle will take place in the deserts to the north-west.

HE SAID many ISIS commanders have already fled, but he knows that fighting Islamists among the city’s populace will be terribly difficult, like a surgeon ‘lifting out a cancer’. The danger in this strategy, of course, is that many Islamists might escape from the city.

This sparked a warning this week from the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Julian King, who urged the EU to prepare for an invasion of terrorists if Mosul is liberated as Islamic State fighters seek to return to their home countries and wreak havoc.

What is beyond doubt is that Mosul may prove a far tougher fight than any other ISIS stronghold so far. Between 4,000 and 8,000 jihadists are thought to remain there, far more than the few hundred who held out in Fallujah for five weeks in the summer.

Most are hard-core fighters who will not shy away from battle, although their first tactic will be to simply slow the coalition’s advance by littering Mosul with booby traps and improvised explosive devices.

As the fight intensifies, ISIS is likely to fall back to the Old City on the west bank of the Tigris, a maze of narrow alleyways that will force the Iraqis to abandon their heavy armour and fight on foot.

‘ISIS will put bombs everywhere — by roadsides, under cars, in buildings and so on, including some that are fake,’ said Dr Michael Knights, of the Washington Institute For Near East Policy, who has spent time on patrol with Iraqi security forces.

‘The idea is just to create a huge

improvised minefield, and when the enemy’s forces are trying to pick their way around them, they will open up with machine-guns or mortars. It doesn’t take many fighters to do that.’

Another tactic, he said, may be mass waves of armoured ‘suicide trucks’. Industrial estates in the city have been commandeered to massmanufacture car bombs — one of which was deployed on Monday outside the city — and the group is likely to launch ‘tens of them at a time’ to overwhelm attackers.

‘The Iraqis are getting better at dealing with this threat, and they will have drones and anti-tank weapons to protect them,’ said Dr Knights. ‘But there may be some bad days where an entire brigade crumbles after being hit by ten suicide bombers at once.’

In addition, the jihadis have also created a range of underground tunnels to shield fighters and transport equipment. And there is a fear that they may have stocks of homemade chemical weapons such as mustard gas, so tens of thousands of gas masks have been issued to Iraqi troops as a precaution.

While the gas is not very effective militarily — there is a high risk of it blowing back on those who use it — the mere sight of clouds of potentially deadly fumes can spread panic in enemy ranks.

One possibility is that as Islamic State comes under pressure, local people may join the fight against the jihadis themselves.

The city is already home to a number of resistance cells, and in recent months they have reportedly carried out a number of killings — sometimes by male assassins disguised in abbayas, the billowing black cloaks that Mosul’s womenfolk now wear.

Other residents have acted as spies for the coalition, which has killed more than a dozen ISIS field commanders in Mosul since September, including three Islamists from the Russian republic of Chechnya who were in charge of the defence plan. But for all that ISIS is widely loathed, any hope that the city might ‘liberate’ itself may prove somewhat forlorn.

First, ISIS has set up a police state to rival Saddam Hussein’s, indoctrinating young children at religious schools and encouraging them to inform even on their parents, according to the blog Mosul Eye, one of the few reliable sources of information in the city.

Second, the Iraqi forces coming to free them are almost as disliked as ISIS itself by the residents here. One of the reasons Mosul fell to ISIS in the first place was because of the age-old hatreds between two branches of Islam, the Sunnis and Shias.

The city’s overwhelmingly Sunni population hated rule from Baghdad, where the government is dominated by Iran-backed Shia Muslim politicians. (Islamic State itself practises an extreme form of Sunni Islam.)

To many residents in Mosul, the Shia Iraqi army that fled was seen as a sectarian occupying force, and much as most people now hate ISIS even more, they also fear a return to the past.

Making them more nervous still is the presence in the coalition massing outside the city of Shia militias, some of which have served elsewhere in Iraq as anti-Sunni death squads, and have been accused of widespread torture and executions.

Iraq’s prime minister, Haider alAbadi, says the militias will be restricted to holding ground outside the city, but Shia commanders have other ideas.

‘Mosul is the capital of ISIS and our forces are needed,’ said Jaffar al-Husseini, spokesman for the Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah brigade. ‘Nobody can stop us in this fight, not even Mr Abadi.’

Others with a close interest in the battle include militias from the autonomous state of Kurdistan in northern Iraq, who will secure the area to the north of the city, and local Sunni militias, who are actually anti-ISIS, and may vie for control of Mosul when the battle is over.

Optimists in the coalition camp hope that a successful purging of Islamic State from Iraq could start the beginning of a national healing process, with Iraqi forces for once being seen as liberators rather than oppressors of their own people.

However, there will obviously be no quick fix in the aftermath of this vital battle. And the nature of what will come afterwards is, unsurprisingly, still very much up in the air.

If ISIS is successfully defeated in Mosul, there will be a dangerous power vacuum, with rival factions vying for supremacy.

First, though, there is the massive challenge of dislodging the murderous fanatics who hold the city. All we can say for sure is that the usual rules of war will not apply — and that very many people are going to die.