ERBIL // Two days into the battle to wrest Fallujah from ISIL, only a handful of civilians have managed to escape the fighting, and concern is growing for the thousands of residents who remain trapped in the city.
The few families who were able to flee give chilling accounts of how ISIL is preventing the desperate and starving population from leaving even as the fight for the city is predicted to be fierce and drawn out.
“When Daesh found out a group of us wanted to escape, they came to our houses and told us that they would kill anyone who tried to leave, and burn down their houses,” said Ishwaq, a mother of four who fled Fallujah on Monday.
ISIL beat the men of the group with sticks, and intimidated the women, but Ishwaq’s family nevertheless set out when Iraqi forces launched their assault on May 23.
They walked for hours through the arid countryside to avoid ISIL checkpoints, hiding in irrigation ditches and taking off their shoes to make less noise before finally reaching the Iraqi forces who had encircled the city.
“My feet were hurting from all the walking,” said Mohammed, Ishtak’s nine-year-old son, but he is lucky to have made it out of Fallujah alive.
Around 50,000 residents are still in the city, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which has been delivering aid to those who made it out before the fighting started. The US military recently estimated that between 60,000 to 90,000 people remain there, according to Reuters.
According to the NRC, ISIL prevented people from leaving the city long before the battle commenced, and only 80 families have managed to get out in recent weeks.
“We are deeply concerned that there are no safe exits from the intense fighting,” said Nasr Muflahi, the NRC’s country director in Iraq.
When Fallujah became the first city in Iraq to fall to ISIL in January 2014, it registered a population of around 300,000.
Most of its inhabitants have since swelled the ranks of Iraq’s 3.3 million internally displaced. The remainder are facing starvation and the prospect of becoming collateral damage in a brutal battle for the city.
Cut off from the outside, the residents trapped in the city are running out of food. Ishwaq claims that a mother in her neighbourhood recently drowned herself and her children, preferring a swift death to the torturous process of starvation.
Exposed to the fighting and shortage of food, water and medicine, the plight of Fallujah’s trapped citizens will only get worse as the fighting drags on.
Iraq’s leadership has voiced optimism about the fight to retake Fallujah.
Prime minister Haider Al Abadi on Monday confidently asserted that “the enemy is collapsing” under the pressure of the assault. But he made similar boasts in May last year when Iraqi forces set out to recapture the city of Ramadi, only for it to take eight months to flush ISIL out.
Many fear that Fallujah will be an even sterner test for Iraq’s armed forces.
“The battle for Fallujah will be tough, probably the toughest the ISF [Iraqi Security Forces] have faced until know,” said Alex Mello, lead Iraq security analyst at Horizon Client Access, a New York-based consultancy firm.
“Fallujah has been a hard-core insurgent urban stronghold since 2004, and a large number of ISIL fighters will be locals with families in the city. Fallujah is also a symbolic centre of the Sunni insurgency, so ISIL may opt to fight out an urban last stand,” he said.
Fallujah’s status as a long-time insurgency stronghold makes it a red rag for Iraq’s Shiite militias, which have been accused of unlawful killings of Sunni civilians in the past.
The militia groups, also known as the Hashed Al Shaabi, have been an effective force against ISIL, but their sectarian bend makes them a liability in Sunni areas like Anbar province, where Fallujah is located.
Their ire is further inflamed by a spate of recent bombings in Baghdad that killed hundreds of predominantly Shiite civilians in attacks claimed by ISIL.
The Shiite militias are out in forceat Fallujah, but reports suggest that army and police units have been designated to advance into the city itself, while the militias remain on the outskirts – a measure also intended to drain ISIL of support from Fallujah’s Sunni inhabitants.
“Ultimately the key will be to not have the Hashed go in and secure Fallujah but other units of the ISF that are more amenable to the local population there,” said Michael Stephens, head of the Royal United Services Institute in Qatar.
But the militias could cause death and destruction in Fallujah even if they stay out of the city.
Images and video posted on social media show the militias deploying an array of unguided missile systems, which they have reportedly begun to rain down on the city. Some of them are Russian-made thermobaric missiles, which can wipe out entire neighbourhoods; others are crudely assembled, oversized rockets that look like they have been taken out of a comic book.
Be it at the hand of the Hashed or ISF units, humanitarian organisations on the ground fear that the death toll amongst civilians will be high.
“Aid agencies are consistently concerned about ongoing military operations in Anbar and in Fallujah in particular,” said the NRC’s Mr Muflahi.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
