‘Human shields’ tell of tyranny

HAMMAM AL-ALIL, Iraq— Fear and hunger are driving an ever-growing number of Iraqi civilians into a camp in Hammam al-Alil, where they share harrowing tales of deadly violence and extremist tyranny inMosul.

Some arrive at the displacement camp, the largest in Mosul, on foot, but most of them are crammed into buses and trucks, relieved and exhausted.

Half a million people are displaced as a result of the massive offensive to retake Iraq’s second city from the Islamic State group.

Thursday saw what the Norwegian Refugee Council said was the biggest single-day displacement since the start of the operation, with 20,000 fleeing neighborhoods of westMosul.

“I feel safe, I did not think I would get out of there alive,” said ShamsHassan, a woman in her forties who reached the Hammam al-Alil camp on Friday with 16 members of her family.

She is from the al-Faruq neighborhood of Mosul’s Old City and lost track of the numberoftimessheandher relatives had to change houses and neighborhoods in recent months.

“They always wanted us to be in front of them to use us as human shields. They would come to tell us to change houses,” she said.

Those who tried to flee were executed in the streets and their bodies hung from posts.” resident Mosul

Shams Hassan,

A large population remains inMosul’s Old City, where IS appears to have concentrated most of it remaining resources. Some estimates put the number of civilians still trapped in westMosul at 250,000.

Human shields have become a central feature of the extremists’ defense and IS has stopped at nothing to deter people from escaping.

“Those who tried to flee were executed in the streets and their bodies hung from posts,” Hassan said.

Her mother, who reached Hammam al-Alil a few weeksearlier, satnext to her, her gaze lost in the distance.

“Daesh would take our food,” the elderly woman said, usingaderogatory Arabic acronym for IS. “They would come with their guns and take our clothes too.”

Trapped residents inside the areas still controlled by IS have warned recently that hunger was beginning to kill more people than the intense fighting itself.

There is no clean water left to drink and even unclean water is hard to come by. People are boiling paper and cartons to fill their stomachs.

Aid groups have been delivering assistance in the camps to tens of thousands of civilians daily but the lack of funding, the recent peak in displacementandsoaring temperatures are leaving many outside the relief net.

“We fled death only to face death here ... Take us home, it is better for us,” one man said. “An airstrike will come and we will die together. We were eating grass like cows but at least we were in our homes.”