Civilians at grave risk in last stages of Mosul battle

Up to 200,000 civilians caught between fanatical terrorists and advancing Iraqi forces are in grave danger in the final stages of the battle for Mosul, a senior UN official said Monday.
More than seven months into the massive operation to recapture Mosul from Daesh, Iraqi forces have retaken the city’s east and large parts of its western side, but the militants are putting up tough resistance in areas they still hold.
“We are deeply concerned that right now, in the last final stages of the campaign to retake Mosul, that the civilians... in (Daesh) areas are probably at graver risk now than at any other stage of the campaign,” Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, told AFP.
Grande said that the UN estimates there are between 180,000 and 200,000 civilians in Daesh-held areas of Mosul, the majority of them in the Old City area.
Iraqi aircraft have dropped leaflets over Mosul calling on civilians to leave and move toward security forces, which may push more civilians to flee.
“In the past several weeks, 160,000 civilians have fled, and our expectation is that, because of this order (from the government), we could be seeing a similar number of civilians flee in coming days,” Grande said.
“Altogether, since the start of Mosul conflict, 760,000 civilians have left their homes, and we are looking at the possibility of another 200,000 civilians leaving,” she said.
Of the 760,000 civilians who have fled, some 150,000 have since returned home, leaving more than 600,000 currently displaced.
According to reports from families who have managed to flee, conditions in Daesh-held Mosul are increasingly dire.
“We understand that medicines are very scarce, that there are severe shortages of safe drinking water, that there are very limited stocks of food. We also are aware that families which try to escape are often targeted by snipers,” Grande said.
“You have an enclosed area, you have fighters which are determined to hold out, the civilians are in many ways trapped in that area, there haven’t been resupplies into the Old City for months,” she said.
“You add all of that up and we are looking at a very desperate situation.”
Meanwhile, Iraq’s mostly Iran-backed Shiite paramilitary forces reached the border with Syria on Monday after securing a string of small villages west of Mosul, according to a spokesman for the group.
The move follows a push by the government-sanctioned forces to retake a number of small villages and key supply lines from Daesh in the vast deserts west of Mosul. Iraq’s conventional military has focused on clearing the city itself, a slow, grinding process in dense urban terrain packed with tens of thousands of civilians.
The paramilitary forces — mostly Shiite fighters with close ties to Iran referred to as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) — began Monday’s operation by pushing Daesh militants out of the center of the town of Baaj, some 40 km from the Syrian border, according to Shiite lawmaker Karim Al-Nouri.
The fighters plan to “erect a dirt barricade and dig a trench” along the border, said Sheikh Sami Al-Masoudi, a PMF leader, describing how the forces would secure the porous border area that has long been a haven for smugglers and insurgent activity.
Al-Masoudi described Baaj as the last Daesh supply line between Syria and Iraq in the area and said the paramilitary forces reached the border by retaking the village of Um Jrais.
After securing the border area, Iraq’s the PMF are ready to move inside Syrian territories, according to Hashim Al-Mousawi, a leader with the powerful Al-Nujaba militia that falls under the PMF umbrella.
But, Al-Mousawi added such a move would require the approval of the Iraqi government.

Source: Arab News