‘It feels like the coalition is killing more than Isil’

Residents walk in west Mosul after food distribution by Iraqi troops. Isil militants have situated snipers and other defences among the civilian population to repel advancing troops away. The younger children flinched at the sound of a helicopter whirring overhead, instinctively running into the relative safety of their house.

Thousands have fled these districts in recent days as fighting between the army and Isil intensifies, but many decided to stay – preferring to take the risk in their homes than live as refugees in one of the overcrowded camps on the city’s outskirts.

That anyone still lives in the ruins is a measure of their desperation. The Iraqi army says it has carried out 3,780 sorties against Isil in northern Iraq since the offensive to liberate Mosul began, an average of almost 30 a day.

The US, which is supporting Iraqi forces, has conducted more than double that. “They dropped leaflets over the city telling us not to worry about the strikes, saying that they were extremely precise and would not hurt the civilians,” says Mr Ahmed, 47. “Now it feels like the coalition is killing more people than Isil.”

He said he thought as many as 300 people had been killed in raids during the battle to liberate Samood and his late brother’s neighbourhood alMansour. It was difficult to verify the claim.

A report by Airwars, a UK-based organisation which monitors international air strikes against Isil, suggested as many as 370 civilian deaths could be attributed to coalition raids in the first week of March alone.

Mr Ahmed’s family had spent the past 10 days moving from house to house on Isil’s orders. He says their home was commandeered last Monday by a Chechen Isil fighter who was using it as a sniper position.

The militants had spent weeks preparing for the army’s offensive to retake the western side of the city.

“About a month ago, Daesh came to our house and gave me a drill,” the father of four said. “They drew a red square on my wall and gave me an hour to make a hole wide enough for them to climb through. Once I was finished I was ordered to tell my neighbour to do the same.”

With coalition drones monitoring their every move from the skies, the jihadists have taken to moving between houses rather than out in the open where they can be targeted.

Mr Ahmed pointed to the hole in the wall, which if you looked through it at the right angle you could see all the way down to the end of the street.

He said that by the end, 400 houses in the neighbourhood had holes driven right through them.

When the battle neared, the jihadists laid down wrought iron bars over the length of the street in the hope of stalling advancing Humvees.

“It was soon after that they set fire to our car so we couldn’t leave and the sniper took over my home,” he said.

He said the fighters had been a mixture of Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan and Chechen. The Chechens were known as the fiercest and were chosen as fighters or specialist snipers. The rest were used as suicide bombers.

Mr Ahmed’s children delighted in showing us the body of one of the dead militants, which was missing most of its skull and had its legs twisted in an unnatural position. Still wrapped around his waist was an explosive belt, which had had its wires cut.

The army had ordered people to leave the body there, not to bury or cremate it or do anything that would pay it reverence. They said his nom de guerre was Abu Salah al-Iraqi and that he was the last Isil fighter to be killed in the Samood neighbourhood, marking the moment the residents knew they were free.

Looking at the rotting corpse, Mr Ahmed recalled something Abu Salah had said to him five days earlier. ‘“The army and the Americans will destroy your neighbourhood, they will destroy everything in it just to get to us. They will turn Samood into Kobane (a northern Syrian town which suffered near-total destruction in the battle to oust Isil).”

“The only loser in this war is the civilians,” Mr Ahmed said.

A double bomb attack targeting Shia pilgrims at a bus station in the Syrian capital Damascus killed at least 40 Iraqis and wounded 120 more who were going to pray at a shrine, the Iraqi foreign ministry said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which the Hezbollahrun al-Manar TV station said had been carried out by two suicide bombers.