Khazir, Iraq // Hundreds of families who fled Mosul last year left displacement camps on Wednesday to head back to their homes, in the biggest wave yet of returns to the city.
Iraqi forces recently completed their recapture of eastern Mosul, which tens of thousands of people had fled since the October 17 start of a massive offensive against the ISIL.
According to the UN, more than 180,000 people have been displaced since the start of the offensive but at least 22,000 have since returned to their homes.
The authorities have been organising returns from Khazir and Hasansham displacement camps twice a week.
“We are now taking 500 families, which means 2,700 people, to their liberated houses,” local official Mustafa Hamid Sarhan said at the Khazir camp, which lies south-east of Mosul.
“This is the biggest wave,” he added, as at least 50 buses lined up for families cleaning up their tents and packing their belongings for the journey home.
One of them was Dhabbah Mohammed Khader, a 45-year-old woman from the neighbourhood of Al Zahraa who was about to return to her home with two of her sons.
“I’m so happy we finally got rid of Daesh,” she said. “We can go back home now,” said the woman, tears running down her face.
Meanwhile ISIL fighters have taken up sniper positions in buildings on the west bank of the Tigris river ahead of an expected government offensive into that side the city.
The commander of the campaign to retake ISIL’s last major stronghold in Iraq has said preparations to cross the Tigris are under way.
ISIL fighters have moved in recent days into Mosul’s main medical complex made up of a dozen buildings located between two of the city’s five bridges — positions that can be used for observation and sniper fire.
Some 750,000 people live in western Mosul, according to the United Nations which has voiced grave concerns for civilians in an area beyond the reach of aid organisations.
It took 100,000 Iraqi troops, members of regional Kurdish security forces and Shiite paramilitaries, backed by air and ground support from a US-led coalition, almost 100 days to retake eastern Mosul in what has become the biggest battle in Iraq since the US-led invasion of 2003.
Taking the west side — the location of Mosul’s Grand Mosque where ISIL leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi declared a “caliphate” in 2014 — could prove even tougher as it is crisscrossed by streets too narrow for armoured vehicles.
The extremists are expected to put up a fierce fight as they are cornered in a shrinking area but the narrow streets could also deprive them of one of their most effective weapons: suicide-car bombs.
The group released drone footage on Wednesday of cars driving at high speed into clusters of army Humvees and armoured vehicles before blowing up.
In some cases, Iraqi soldiers can be seen running away as the car bombs speed towards them. The recordings also show munitions dropped from the drones.
Iraqi forces estimated the number of militants inside Mosul at 5,000-6,000 at the start of the battle, and have said 3,300 have been killed in the fighting.
More than 160,000 civilians have been displaced since the start of the offensive in Mosul, which had a pre-war population of about 2 million. Aid agencies estimate the dead and wounded — both civilian and military — at several thousand.
*Agence France-Presse
