ISIL preys on Mosul’s residents with snipers, drones and mortars

Families fear their suffering will be even worse in the displacement camps which are already beyond capacity, Florian Neuhof reports from eastern Mosul

A medic at an Iraqi special forces field hospital lends a helping hand to civilians escaping the fighting in eastern Mosul on November 20,2016. Florian Neuhof for The National

Mosul // Salem Khader has had no time to mourn the death of his wife, who was killed two days earlier by one of ISIL’s mortar shells raining down on the Mosul neighbourhoods no longer under its control. He is too preoccupied with saving his own life.

Sitting in a wheelchair, Salem is pushed through the unpaved roads of the city’s suburbs by a male relative, his family rushing to escape the fighting raging a few hundred metres behind them.

They are part of a steady stream of civilians hurrying down a residential road leading into Aden neighbourhood, where Iraqi special forces are battling ISIL’s militants for control of the area in the east of the city. Carrying white flags, the locals walk silently in small groups. Behind them, the rattle of machine gunfire and the dry thud of explosions reverberate through the dense urban sprawl. In front, mortar shells thump into the ground, kicking up earth and filling the air with shrapnel.

Elite units known as Iraqi Special Operations Forces or – more commonly – as the Golden Division pushed into Mosul on November 4 after Iraqi and Kurdish forces had tightened the noose around the city in an operation that began on October 17.

The battle to end ISIL’s two-and-a-half year reign in Mosul is taking a heavy toll on its inhabitants. Civilian casualties are mounting, and many of the survivors are at breaking point.

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“We are really tired of this. I’m 47 years old and I have never experienced anything like this,” says Salem. As he speaks, an elderly female relative breaks down in tears, wailing as she slumps to the curb.

The family has just turned a corner and entered a street in the neighbourhood of Kirkukli where a special forces unit has set up a forward command post. Black Humvees are parked in front of the house where Colonel Muntabar Al Samari directs the movement of the Mosul Battalion of the Iraqi Special Operations Forces Second Brigade. More armoured vehicles are positioned at both ends of the street, and earthen barricades have been shovelled to cut it off from the urban maze to stop suicide car bombs.

The soldiers of the Mosul Battalion advanced past Salem’s house three days ago, but the nearby fighting remained intense, and the family decided to make a run for a relative’s house in the nearby neighbourhood of Arbajiyah. But ISIL continues to indiscriminately pound Arbajiyah with mortars, and its snipers shoot civilians in streets no longer under its control.

In spite of the acute danger, Mosul’s inhabitants are reluctant to leave the city.

“Why would we go? We would be suffering in the camps,” says Amer Salim, standing at the gate of his house the temporary base of the Mosul Battalion. Amer’s mother and his two brothers did leave, walking to the Gogjali district just outside Mosul, where they were trucked to the Hasansham displacement camp set up in Kurdish-controlled territory.

According to Amer, the feedback he has been getting over the phone has not been good.

“They told us there is little to eat in Hasansham. They told us to stay in Mosul,” he says.

Amer’s six young children – three girls, three boys – mill around him as he stands at the gate of his house. Later, their voices are heard above the din of war as they play next to the Humvees.

Playtime is interrupted when the heavily armed soldiers spot a tiny shape hovering above their heads. ISIL has launched a drone to reconnoitre enemy positions and movement, and the Iraqi troops waste no time trying to blast it out of the sky. The heavy machine guns in the turrets of the Humvees open up, and the soldiers spray bullets into the sky with their automatic rifles.

When the deafening crackle finally ceases, the drone is nowhere to be seen, but the base has likely been spotted, and the inhabited street is now in danger of being targeted by ISIL’s mortars.

In the bitter battle for Mosul, civilians make up an increasing proportion of the casualties. Of the almost 200 heavily wounded evacuated to hospitals outside the city in the week ending on November 20, at least 20 per cent were non-combatants, according to the UN.

Bashir Jaber, the head of a Mosul Battalion forward field hospital in Gogjali says that on a bad day, up to 90 locals are treated by his medics. While the field hospital was set up for soldiers wounded in battle, it has become a life saver for Mosul residents in urgent need of treatment. The medics do what they can, but it is not always enough. Since it was set up in the area two weeks ago, Bashir has witnessed around 80 Mosul residents succumb to their wounds.

Some of the civilians who arrive at the field hospital come with gunshot wounds, as ISIL’s snipers direct their fire at locals in liberated areas. Others fall victim to suicide car bombs launched by the insurgents. These explosives-packed vehicles are not only the biggest menace faced by Iraqi forces, they also obliterate nearby houses when detonated, killing and maiming those inside.

Residents are also struggling to meet basic needs. Food and fuel are getting scarce, and the power is cut, keeping the lights off and rendering water pumps useless. Amer says he has had to resort to the food left behind by his relatives in the house next door to keep his family fed. Medicine is in short supply, and hospitals inaccessible.

None of this has convinced Bahiyyah and her family to leave. The middle-aged women from the neighbourhood of Bakir has made her way to the field hospital in Gogjali in the hope of finding the prescription medicine she needs to prevent her arteries from clogging up. But the converted home, where soldiers come to get patched up and blood-soaked bandages mix with spent machine gun cartridges in front of the entrance, is no place for advanced medicine.

Empty-handed, Bahiyyah sits on a street corner waiting for a ride back to Bakir with her two sons, Ahmed and Salim.

Bakir remains right on the front line that snakes through eastern Mosul, but Bahiyyah dismisses the idea of leaving the city.

“Those who go to the camps don’t come back,” she says, her voice feeble from illness. After a while, a truck pulls up and drives the mother and her sons back into Mosul.

Army trucks ferry families that decide to leave out of Gogjali. In the late afternoon, a Mosul Battalion Humvee delivers Zaineb and Hamed to the field hospital. The elderly couple had been walking with the rest of the family from their home in Aden when Hamed, a portly but frail man with a white beard, collapsed from exhaustion. Soldiers driving by picked up the old couple in their armoured vehicle, and Hamed leans unsteadily on his walking stick as he is slowly guided to a plastic chair by the Humvee crew.

Zaineb, fired up by desperation and worry, is a bundle of energy. Carrying the families remaining foodstuffs in an improvised backpack, she does not leave her husband’s side, and talks incessantly to her saviours.

“We’ve been walking since the morning. We don’t know where we are going,” she says. She relaxes a little when the rest of the family arrives in an army truck. Together, they wait for a ride out of the war zone.

Zaineb and Hamed are part of a human tide that is about to overwhelm efforts to bring relief to the embattled population of Mosul.

Due to funding shortages, aid agencies have not been able to build enough displacement camps to cater for large numbers of civilians fleeing the fighting. According to the UN, on November 20 there was only space for 60,000 people in camps around Mosul when the number of displaced from the city and the surrounding area already stood at almost 70,000.

The cost of waging war and the displacement of more than three million civilians by the conflict has stretched Iraq’s resources beyond the limit, and the government has not made provisions for a mass exodus from Mosul. Instead, it is advising Mosul residents to stay put.

Faced with the prospect of spending the cold winter nights in an overcrowded camp, or worse, many residents opt to stay in their houses and ignore the perils as best as they can. Fatalism has set in.

“We have a saying here in Mosul: Our house is our tomb,” shrugs Amer, before herding his children back into the courtyard and closing the gate.