Number of civilians fleeing Mosul swells

The number of people fleeing the fighting in the Iraqi city of Mosul is reaching new highs and the condition of the displaced civilians is deteriorating, an aid group said Saturday.
Iraq forces are battling Daesh in the western half of Mosul and nearing a final push to root out the terrorists from their last redoubts in its Old City.
A large number of civilians — around 250,000, according to some estimates — are still trapped in west Mosul and can only flee once the security forces enter their neighborhoods.
“The final push by the Iraqi security forces to retake Mosul from (Daesh) has caused possibly the largest wave of displacement since the beginning of the year,” the Norwegian Refugee Council said.
More than 20,000 fleeing civilians were brought to a camp for displaced people in Hammam Al-Alil, south of Mosul, on Thursday, NRC said, describing that figure as “a six-fold increase from the previous day.”
“Everyone who is fleeing the city is in an extremely fragile state,” said NRC’s Iraq director, Heidi Diedrich.
“Infants and children appear malnourished and it is clear that people are suffering from hunger and trauma,” she said in a statement.
NRC said that the trauma hospital in Hammam Al-Alil treated more trauma wounds on Friday than on any other day since it opened six weeks ago.
The few hundred Daesh fighters left inside the city are increasingly using civilians as human shields to defend their last pockets and hoarding the city’s dwindling food and medical supplies.
Meanwhile, an Iraqi air force helicopter was downed west of Mosul Saturday afternoon after coming under fire from Daesh, according to Iraq’s joint operations command.
The helicopter was hit while supporting Iraq’s mostly Shiite militia forces in an operation to retake villages still held by the militants in the sprawling desert to Mosul’s west, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, the command’s spokesman, said in a statement. The source of the attack was ground fire, the pilot landed safely and there were no fatalities, he added.
In a separate development, the Pentagon said Friday it played no part in an unusual deal in which Daesh terrorists were allowed to leave a key town in Syria — only for some of them to be killed anyway.
The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) had independently cut a deal with the militants that let a group of about 70 of them leave Tabqa, an important city by a dam near the Daesh stronghold of Raqqa.
But as soon as they left the city, US aircraft tracked and killed several of them, officials said.
“This was an agreement for them to leave the Tabqa dam and to leave the remaining portions of the city that ISIS (Daesh) held,” Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis said.
“It doesn’t change the fact that when we see ISIS (Daesh) fighters on the battlefield and have a clean shot at them, we will continue to take it.”

Source: Arab News