MOSUL // The Iraqi man laid the body of his wife, wrapped in a black shroud, gently on the bow of a small wooden boat and held on to it as a second man rowed slowly to pick up the man’s three children standing a few metres away.
The two teenage girls and young boy climbed in, careful not to disturb the balance, for the crossing taking their mother, killed in an air strike this week, to the east bank of the Tigris River.
The family is among hundreds fleeing renewed fighting in western Mosul after US-backed Iraqi forces opened a new front last week in their battle to oust the ISIL militants who seized the city in 2014.
Flooding of the Tigris has cut off all crossing points between east and west and forced the military to dismantle the pontoon bridges set up to link the two halves of Iraq’s second-largest city.
Civilians have been forced to cross the river on small, rickety fishing boats that hold only five or six people at a time, loading them with everything from clothes and food to injured or dead relatives.
Mothers carrying babies, men in wheelchairs, and families of up to 15 people have been paying 1,000 Iraqi dinars (Dh3) per head to make the short journey to the relative safety of eastern Mosul, which was declared liberated from ISIL in January.
Many of the families are from the Musherfa district of western Mosul, which Iraqi forces entered on Friday.
“We suffered ISIL’s injustice, and now that we are free we were promised five bridges,” said 45-year-old Mushref Mohamed, an ice factory worker from Musherfa. “Where are the bridges? We have been waiting for two days.”
“So many of my neighbours and friends died. We were freed, but we are not happy because we lost the people closest to us.”
Then they took down the pontoons, the army initially planned to transport people across the river using steamboats, but now say they have run out of fuel. Even soldiers carrying green army crates full of military documents and cigarettes have had to use the fishing boats.
“We came from the early morning at 7am and have been waiting until now. It is noon. The steamboats do not have fuel. This government cannot provide fuel?” asked Mohsen, a pensioner from the Wadi Hajar area in west Mosul.
Mosul’s permanent bridges have been almost completely destroyed during the seven-month campaign to retake the city from ISIL.
The army opened a new front in the war on Thursday with an armoured division trying to advance into the city from the north. The militants are now besieged in the north-western corner of Mosul which includes the historic Old City and the medieval Grand Al Nouri Mosque with its landmark leaning minaret, where ISIL leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared a “caliphate” spanning swathes of Syria and Iraq in June 2014.
The Iraqi military said on Saturday that Musherfa had been fully retaken, but officers said on Sunday that there was still fighting in the district.
“Fighting Daesh in Musherfa with a large number of families still locked in their houses is making the battle more complicated,” said a colonel from the ninth armoured division.
Additional reinforcements from the elite Rapid Response Division arrived in north-west Mosul on Sunday to help clear areas on the banks of the Tigris.
“The brigade will participate in the battle to retake Hawi Al Kanisa and also help the ninth army division step up pressure on Daesh fighters,” said an officer from the division.
The Iraqi army said last week that it aimed to complete the retaking of Mosul, the largest city to have fallen under ISIL control in both Iraq and Syria, this month.
* Reuters
