Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Ramadan 17, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

As battle escalates, civilians caught in crossfire

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By John Davison — Shihab Ayed and several other men struggled to push a cart carrying the bodies of his son and wife, wrapped in blankets, through a muddy ditch nearly 3 km from their destroyed home in Mosul. Four other carts followed, laden with days-old corpses from air strikes which the men said had killed 21 relatives and neighbours in an area IS militants controlled earlier in the week. Ayed, a 40-year-old labourer, pulled back a blanket to show his only son, three-and-a-half year-old Ahmed, lying lifeless with his eyes closed and a big gash in his right cheek. “Three houses were destroyed by two air strikes,” Ayed said.


“IS fighters were firing from our house and from the road outside, and we were hiding inside. Fifteen minutes later the strikes hit. We pulled the bodies from the rubble and now we’re going to bury them. Then I’ll come back to my three remaining daughters,” Ayed said, in tears.


The bodies had begun to smell but it had only just become safe enough to leave the district, now cleared of the militants, and bring the carts to Mosul airport, where a bus might be able to take them to the nearest village for burial, he said.


Reuters counted about 15 corpses on the carts. They are among the latest victims caught in the crossfire of an intensifying battle between US-backed Iraqi forces and IS militants holed up the centre of Mosul, their last major stronghold in Iraq.


Rights groups have expressed concern over the mounting civilian death toll, as IS fights from homes and densely-populated areas, a threat the Iraqi military and US-led coalition have been countering with heavy weaponry to support troops on the ground.


Families fleeing Mosul in recent weeks have talked of high numbers of civilians killed by air strikes, and said that in many cases IS fighters have already slipped away by the time the bombs hit.


“When the coalition see a sniper on a home, it’s five or minutes before that house is hit,” Mohammed Mahmoud, a 40-year-old former police officer, said in another area of Mosul.


“But they don’t kill the Daesh (IS) militants. Daesh withdraw, and the strikes end up killing civilians - whole families.”


IS’s tactics since the beginning of the offensive to drive them out of Mosul, which began in October, have been to deploy car bombs and snipers, rain shellfire on troops and residents alike and take cover among the civilian population.


Last Friday, even as Ayed and his helpers waited with their carts, helicopters fired at positions in Mosul and forces further back launched Grad missiles into the city.


Human Rights Watch has said the fight to recapture the western half of Mosul has been “dirtier and deadlier to civilians” than the battle to retake the east, which was completed in January.


The New York-based watchdog said Iraqi Interior Ministry units had recently used non-precision rockets in west Mosul.


“Their indiscriminate nature makes their use in populated civilian areas a serious violation of the laws of war,” it said in a statement. Separately, the United Nations says it has received many reports of civilian deaths in air strikes.


The number of civilians killed in the Mosul campaign - by IS, including executions, or by errant Iraqi and coalition fire - is unclear, with various estimates given by residents, watchdogs and the military.


The US-led coalition backing Iraqi forces with air power and military advisers admits causing unintentional civilian deaths.


This month the US military said the total number of civilians killed by the coalition since the start of operations against the militant group in 2014 in both Iraq and Syria was 220.


That estimate is lower than those of some monitoring groups.


Airwars, a journalist-run project to monitor civilian casualties, says at least 2,590 civilians have likely been killed by coalition “actions” since 2014, including scores in Mosul in the first week of March alone.


Coalition and Iraqi forces have mostly been careful to avoid civilian deaths, a reason military officials said they slowed some assaults in eastern Mosul last year.


— Reuters


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