CHRISTMAS IN HELL
Children shot as they fled. Prisoners tortured with drills. In this gripping dispatch from the front line in Iraq, RICHARD PENDLEBURY witnesses the human cost of Islamic State’s barbarity
There was no white Christmas for Mosul. Instead, what fell from the skies was an Islamic State mortar barrage and the answering coalition air strikes. Days of rain have also turned an already desolate landscape into a caramel coloured slush. In short, misery.
Sixty miles to the east lies the city of erbil — capital of the semi-autonomous Iraqi state of Kurdistan — with its vibrant Christian quarter, garishly decorated trees, plastic snowmen and relentless Jingle Bells muzak. There are even speed cameras that threaten £60 fines. here, though, on the edge of the south-eastern Mosul suburb of Sumer, what catches the eye is a helicopter gunship spitting flares into a blue sky to confuse the weapons systems of potential Islamist surface-to-air missiles.
That, and the column of smoke rising hundreds of feet from a suburban street after the latest thunderous bombing mission. Islamic State captured Iraq’s second city in the summer of 2014 when the American-armed government forces collapsed and ran with barely a shot fired.
It was a disaster that shamed not only the post-war Baghdad regime, but its Western backers, who had overthrown the old dictator Saddam hussein.
The Iraqi state’s offensive to retake the city, supported by foreign airpower including the rAF, began on October 17 this year. Since then, more than 100,000 citizens have become refugees. Most are living in vast tented camps on plains and hillsides. No room at the inn for them.
Understandably, many are simply happy to be alive and out of the firing line. Often the escape is the most dangerous part.
Inas, aged six, was one of those who managed to cross no man’s land on Tuesday. her father had held her as he waded waist deep through an irrigation canal.
They were then picked up by an Iraqi police armoured car and whisked to the safety of this position, from which the government is launching a new thrust into the city. how was she? ‘Cold and scared,’ she said. ‘Many people are hurt where we live.’
It is impossible for one so young to articulate anything more of the struggle. And it’s a struggle far bloodier than the official line will admit.
The Islamic State had time to prepare defensive positions and has deployed its most feared weapon, the suicide car bomb, in great numbers — almost 400 so far — against the advancing Iraqi military.
Fighting in the city has been intense, with Iraq’s elite Golden Division finding their armoured vehicles brought to a standstill in suburban streets by a combination of suicide car attacks and sniper fire.
After a lull of several weeks in which the attacking forces took stock of the intense resistance they had faced, this week they have renewed the assault. On Thursday, backed by air strikes, Iraqi forces pressed forward into several districts in the east and south-east of Mosul.
Somewhere in the city, perhaps beyond the river Tigris that divides this sprawling metropolis, is the British journalist and ISIS captive John Cantlie.
Since he was taken in late 2012, he has appeared a number of times as a reluctant — one imagines — mouthpiece, a kind of modern Lord hawhaw for the death cult.
This month, looking ever more gaunt and pale, he has delivered two more internet video ‘reports’ on the battle for Mosul.
ISIS has boasted of destroying almost 600 Iraqi military vehicles in the fighting.
Cantlie said on film: ‘Speaking with some of the mujahideen (Islamist fighters), they say the Iraqi army took the bait, this is exactly what they wanted them to do. They took the bait like a fish that grabs a lure, the mujahideen have drawn them into the centre of Mosul, with all their armoured vehicles.’
While his words are scripted ISIS propaganda, they would appear to contain some truth.
Urban fighting is tough for armoured formations that are not well supported by trained infantry. There have been a number of non-ISIS eyewitness accounts of the resulting wreckage that litters eastern Mosul.
Both sides have also been using drones, of the type that has sold so well in the UK this Christmas.
The Iraqi forces have deployed them for surveillance. Islamic State use them to more fatal effect. In our sector, a senior officer was seriously wounded this week by an ISIS drone that was presumably first used to identify him and then deployed to detonate the explosives it carried.
The overall result of all this bloodshed is a savage stalemate.
ISIS still holds the west bank of the Tigris, with all five city bridges destroyed, while the Iraqis are bogged down in taking the east.
For me, returning to this benighted place has brought back inevitable memories of the day in April 2003 when the city was last ‘liberated’ from a tyrannical oppressor.
Then, the tyrant was Saddam and the usurpers an American-led coalition. reporting for the Mail, I watched as a mob tried to break into one of the main banks.
having caused the collapse in the old order, the Americans were conspicuous by their absence and failure to build a new one.
I wrote this then: ‘Further up the street, a crowd of men advanced, chanting. They were local Arabs who had just left their mosque after Friday prayer and were protesting against the destruction.
‘recognising a westerner, an Arab cleric of Saddam hussein’s Sunni Muslim faith let rip.
‘he said: “Yesterday morning I preached to the Saddam fedayeen militants and the foreign Arab volunteers that they should withdraw from Mosul and not fight you so as to avoid bloodshed here.
‘“And this is the result. This is your responsibility. You do not keep the peace in the city. I ask you to stop the looting and the random firing.
‘“If during the next 24 hours this does not happen, we will arrange secret groups for fighting to keep the peace in Mosul.”
‘Did he mean a vigilante organisation to control looting — or one that would actively oppose the coalition? he would not say. The threat was left hanging in the air.’
Not for long. Mosul, a predominantly Sunni Arab city, boiled throughout the American presence.
early on, two sons of Saddam took refuge there and were killed in a shoot-out with U.S. forces.
When a U.S.-backed government — dominated by the Shia Muslims to whom Sunnis are implacably opposed — came to power in Baghdad, local resentments in Mosul were hardly assuaged.
More recently, Syria collapsed and the hardline Sunni Islamic State fighters came pouring over the border and, to the world’s appalled amazement, took control of a city of more than one million people.
Most of the people are trapped. The rest are dead or under canvas.
The refugee camp at Kharzir on the highway between Mosul and erbil contains 35,000 people.
On approach this week, the 6,000 tents appeared like a great white blanket in a landscape where only electricity pylons broke the flatness.
When we arrived, two buses stood by the main gate. They were full of the sick, pregnant and walking wounded from Mosul’s Christmas week blitz. A heavy-set man with
ISIS targeted people getting water from a well Guards beat camp refugees with clubs
A teenager had been blinded in both eyes
bandages on his face and hands lolled unhappily through an open window of the first bus. A small boy sat beside him.
Ali, 34, was from the ‘liberated’ eastern Mosul district of Gogjali, which has been targeted by ISIS with mortars and car bombs in the past week.
He and his son Ahmed, seven, had ventured outside their home on Tuesday to find food when a mortar dropped ten yards away.
‘There was a water well nearby and the Daesh (the pejorative expression used by Arabs for Islamic State) in the neighbourhood overlooking our own targeted it when anyone went to draw water,’ he said.
Both he and Ahmed were struck by shrapnel. And so they had been evacuated.
The occupants of the second bus were almost entirely female. Two were heavily pregnant. Two had small babies. All were tired, frightened and increasingly voluble.
Dhuha, a confident 13-year-old, was shot by an Islamic State gunman on Boxing Day. Being female she had spent most of the Islamist occupation of Mosul as an ideological prisoner, kept indoors. ‘In my home, we became surrounded by fighting and had no food and water,’ she told me.
‘So we ran away. But once you try to flee [to a government-held area], Daesh say you are an infidel and so they are allowed to kill you.
‘I was with two families and [as we ran] the Daesh fighters were shouting “Come back!” and then they opened fire on us. I was hit in the foot. They fired mortars, but there was an air strike against them and so we escaped.’
Another woman said: ‘Daesh are losing, but so many civilians are being killed at the same time. Often we do not know who is shooting at us. We fear their sleeper cells.
‘Their imams tell us in the mosques: “We will be here for ever even if it seems we have gone.” ’
Ambulances began to arrive from Mosul. The first held the exhausted elderly, one of whom was receiving oxygen. The second held a heartbreaking story of a childhood left in ruins.
Farah, which translates as ‘joy’ or ‘happiness’, though her life has held little of either, was a seven-year-old from the Tahrir district.
She was dressed for the cold in a bobble hat and coat. On her back, she wore a pink rucksack.
When the ambulance doors were swung open, she gazed at this strange, harsh world with large brown eyes and then lay face down on the trolley.
Her father, a clothes merchant called Wissam Rabee, told her story tearfully.
For the past year, with the family trapped in Islamic State-controlled Mosul, Farah had exhibited the symptoms of a brain tumour.
But given the lack of medical facilities in the city there was no means of confirming the diagnosis, let alone treating the cause.
His daughter had been given paracetamol by local medics, who could do no more. Now she was heading for an MRI scan in Erbil. Only then would they know what the malady was and if the diagnosis was too late.
Even worse was to be found hidden in the hills across the Mosul highway.
Camp Hassam Sham 3 was a truly disturbing experience. Though the tents were new and well laid out, the Arab inhabitants seemed crazed by medical neglect, while Kurdish guards — known as the peshmerga — appeared hostile towards them.
We arrived as a small van carrying supplies from an American charity organisation drew up. A crowd of refugees surged towards the gate to claim a package.
One of the peshmerga, his face contorted with anger, vigorously set about those nearest to him with a wooden club. They fled.
His behaviour was more fitting of a concentration camp guard than a refugee guardian.
We had gone to the camp to meet a gentle young mother of three who was clearly dying.
Manar Mohammed Salih, 31, already had one lung removed and was suffering from a tumour behind her eye. She had lost half her body weight but, like Farah, was trapped by circumstance and history. Could we help, she begged.
This became an increasingly disturbing question. A large, desperate crowd soon gathered because we were westerners and they thought we were doctors rather than journalists.
The stories of the war poured forth. Ahmed Jusuf Jasim, 13, was pushed forward. The boy had been blinded in both eyes when an air strike hit an ISIS base in Mosul as he was passing in a car.
Saleem Hasham was in a wheelchair. A Sunni former merchant in Mosul, he said he had been arrested by ISIS because his business partner was Shia.
He was taken to the Islamic State capital of Raqqa in Syria, where he was questioned and tortured. He showed me the deep circular scars in his leg where a drill had been used on him.
His legs had been broken with iron bars. Then he was returned to Mosul and put in a prison, which was dynamited by ISIS during their retreat. He was the only survivor.
Could we help? Can anyone help Iraq?
Along the highway we gave a lift to a trio of young soldiers from a Sunni tribal militia who have aligned themselves against Islamic State. They had been waiting by a destroyed river bridge.
One, Hassan, poured out a litany of complaints which, while personal, boded ill for the greater good.
The central government had not paid them, he said. But they had to continue to serve and maintain a Sunni military presence in the areas being fought over.
The arrival in the north of Shia Popular Mobilisation Units — backed by Shia Iran — was not good. Yes, there would certainly be trouble later.
The Shia commander in our sector said: ‘I cannot tell a lie. Once we have beaten Daesh, there will be an o t h e r ci v i l wa r. Th e r e ar e countries within this country.’
My guess is that Islamic State will be driven from Mosul, but the cost will be high. Many brave Iraqi soldiers will die.
So, too, will scores of mothers and children, trapped inside what is surely the most dangerous place on Earth.
I met many desperate people in the refugee camps this week. But at least they are alive.