ISIL militants in Mosul driven off ... but so are the cars

Many residents who fled Mosul are returning to find that their vehicles have gone, either used as car bombs by ISIL or barricades by both the extremists and the Iraqi forces fighting them in the city.

Iraqi soldiers walk down a street barricaded with vehicles in Mosul’s western Al Shifaa district on June 15, 2017. Mohamed El Shahed / AFP

Mosul // Saliha Sultan searches in vain for the family car among mounds of charred and mangled vehicles blocking roads in parts of Mosul retaken from ISIL.

Cars and lorries of all shapes and colours, in varying condition, fill the streets of the northern Iraqi city as government forces battle to retake its last western districts from the extremist militants.

Mrs Sultan is one of tens of thousands of civilians who have fled Mosul since anti-ISIL fighters backed by a US-led coalition launched the battle to retake the city in October. Her family left in their home in the west Mosul district of Haramat in March.

Now, she is one of the many Iraqis returning home to find their vehicles are nowhere to be seen.

“We parked it near the house and left ... but when we returned, it wasn’t there,” said the 40-year-old, dressed in a purple and brown overcoat as she searched for the family pickup truck with a neighbour. “I don’t know who took it.”

All around recaptured Mosul neighbourhoods, wrecked cars, windowless buses and upturned trucks block the streets, while empty yellow taxis sit abandoned by the road.

Cars parked near abandoned homes are covered in dust and rubble, some with windows shattered in the fighting.

Umm Kamal, another returning Haramat resident in her forties, said she had no idea where her family’s car has disappeared to either.

She and her family left the car near their home when they escaped as clashes intensified last month, but a few weeks later it has vanished.

“We reported it to the security forces, and we hope they will bring it back to us,” said Umm Kamal. “My children worked for 15 years to be able to buy it.”

Abu Nashmi, a 31 year-old member of the security forces, said he and colleagues have helped to reunite several families with their cars.

“Many families are complaining about their cars having gone missing, burnt or stolen by ISIL,” he said.

“Sometimes, we find cars parked in the parking lots of other people’s houses,” he said.

“If there’s data available, we contact their owners and ask them to come and take them.”

Rami Al Tamimi, a first lieutenant with the Rapid Response forces fighting ISIL, said the militants often used abandoned cars to defend themselves against advancing Iraqi troops.

“Daesh would gather cars from the streets, trying to block our progress” with improvised road barriers, he said.

They would “burn them to block the view of reconnaissance drones, as well as Iraqi and coalition planes,” he said.

In areas they had retreated from, “they rigged cars and trucks with explosives to detonate them remotely as we advanced”, he added.

Near the Haramat neighbourhood, a large barrier of cars stacked one on top of the other cuts across the main road.

Abu Hassan, a 40-year-old businessman, said vehicles left behind by fleeing civilians were used “as a defence line between the army and Daesh during the fighting”.

“ISIL burned some of these cars as revenge against owners who did not pledge allegiance” after it overran the city in 2014, Abu Hassan said.

But after Iraqi forces launched their assault to retake the ISIL bastion, the extremists “turned a large number of the cars into car bombs, and burned others to obstruct the view of warplanes”.

On their side, Iraqi “military bulldozers worked to pile cars and trucks from the streets on top of each other, out of fear of car bombs and to block any attack by Daesh”.

Mosul civilians also helped, Lt Tamimi said.

“A large number of families helped the army by parking their car in the middle of the road to cut it off from ISIL,” the officer said.

“We heard many say, ‘Rather my car than my family’.”

* Agence France-Presse