Hammam Al Alil, Iraq // Sulphur springs and a reopened spa in this Iraqi town near Mosul have become a place of refuge for soldiers fighting ISIL and civilians fleeing the extremist group alike.
“We fight on the front line and we come here when we get leave,” says 32-year-old Sahad Mohammed Jaber, a member of a federal police artillery unit.
“We relax, take a bath and go back to battle,” he adds, walking around the dilapidated spa in his dripping wet white socks and a police cap tightly fitted to the brow.
Hammam Al Alil lies a half-hour drive south of the front line in west Mosul, where thousands of Iraqi forces are attempting to root out diehard ISIL fighters defending their last major bastion in Iraq.
The town, which sits on the west bank of the Tigris river, was retaken in the early stages of the Mosul offensive – Iraq’s largest military operation in years – which began almost six months ago.
Hammam Al Alil, which means “The bath of the sick” in Arabic, is well known across Iraq and, although the spa’s white tiles are peeling off the walls, it provides a much needed space for leisure.
One soldier does a backflip into one of the round pools of warm sulphur water while others have their backs rubbed down with soap.
The spa is also open to the tens of thousands of civilian men who continue to flee Mosul every week as Iraqi forces advance through the city’s western half.
Some of them live in tents in a large and overcrowded displacement camp just a few minutes south of Hammam Al Alil where everything from drinking water to food and latrines are in short supply.
More than 200,000 people have already fled west Mosul since a renewed offensive there was launched in mid-February and after crossing paths on the front line, soldiers and civilians meet again at the spa.
“I fled from the Yarmuk neighbourhood but Daesh caught me,” says one of the spa’s civilian visitors, Mohammed Aziz, who walked from the displacement camp with his son, brother and cousin.
“They took my ID, hit me on the head and searched me before killing people who were fleeing in front me.”
“Many people, families ... 19 people in total. They assassinated children the age of my son,” he says, squeezing Omar, his five-year-old boy.
“I made it out alive by saying I had a sponsor” in ISIL.
After spending close to three years of his life trapped in ISIL’s self-declared “caliphate”, Mr Aziz says he was delighted to relax in the same pool as those the extremists view as heretics deserving death.
“There are people from Basra, Diwaniya, Karbala, Baghdad ... the people of the south are my brothers,” he says with a broad smile.
Iraq’s south is mostly Shiite while Mosul is overwhelmingly Sunni.
While Iraq’s regular forces are not recruited along sectarian lines, their make-up reflects the country’s demography and the majority of the fighters involved in the six-month-old operation against ISIL are Shiite.
Meanwhile, the staff at the Hammam Al Ali spa are happy to see it crowded again.
“Under Daesh, people had no money so very few people came,” says Hussein Abdallah, one of the spa’s employees. “Thank God, now salaries are being paid again and the security forces also come here.”
There were some regular visitors under the caliphate, Mr Abdallah says.
“Daesh fighters would always come here. They would go to fight and then come here after the battle,” he says, listing some of their nationalities: “Iraqis, Europeans, Chechens, Chinese.”
“When we retook this area, we changed the water,” says Laith Ali Farhan, a government fighter. “Because you know, these people were very dirty.”
* Agence France-Presse
