by PATRICK COCKBURN
On 22 May, Ahmed Mohsen, an unemployed taxi driver, left
his house in the Islamic State-controlled western part of Mosul to try to escape
across the Tigris to the government-held eastern side of the city. He and his
mother, along with ten other people, carried rubber tyres down to the river:
most of them couldn’t swim, and they planned to tie them together to make a
raft. The siege of Mosul was in its seventh month and Ahmed was both desperate
and starving: he and his mother were living on handfuls of wheat they cooked,
though he said it made him feel sick. His friends believe that lack of food made
him light-headed and led him to risk crossing the river. ‘Even if I die in the
river,’ he told them, ‘it will be better than living here.’
IS snipers
were shooting people who tried to leave. Their commanders calculated that
holding the civilian population hostage, as human shields, would deter Iraqi
government troops and the US-led coalition air forces from using the full extent
of their firepower. This strategy had worked, to an extent, during the siege of
east Mosul, which began on 17 October; it was three months before that part of
the city was captured. But by the time the assault on west Mosul began on 19
February there was little sign of Iraqi or American restraint. As the
bombardment intensified, the only plausible escape route for Ahmed was across
the Tigris between the Fifth and Sixth Bridges, both of which had been put out
of action by coalition airstrikes. He had already seen IS snipers kill three
people who’d tried to cross and his luck was no better: a sniper shot him in the
back and killed him, along with nine other members of his party, before they had
even put their tyres in the water. Only one man, a good swimmer, got across to
the other side. According to people living in houses overlooking the riverbank,
Ahmed’s mother stayed beside his body for three days. Nobody dared to go to help
her because they were afraid of being shot; on the third day, they say, they
could no longer see her or the body of her son. They were probably thrown into
the river, like hundreds of others.
I had got to know about Ahmed in an
indirect way, two months before he died. After IS captured Mosul in June 2014 it
became difficult for journalists or anybody outside the city to talk to people
living under its rule. IS did everything it could to seal off the population
from contact with the outside world. It blew up mobile phone masts, banned the
use of phones and executed anybody caught using them in the few high places
where there was reception. You could always interview people who had fled IS
territory, but this wasn’t a satisfactory way of gathering information: refugees
from Mosul arriving in Iraqi government or Kurdish-controlled territory were at
the mercy of local military and civilian authorities and had every incentive to
denounce IS as demonic, to dispel suspicions that they had been collaborators or
members. Mosul is a Sunni Arab city and Shia, Kurds, Christians and Yazidis
suspect Sunnis in general of colluding with IS. ‘I have never seen such
terrified people in my life as a group of young men who had run away from Mosul
waiting to be vetted by Iraqi security to see if they were former IS fighters,’
a human rights worker in a camp for internally displaced persons 15 miles south
of Mosul told me. ‘One day I saw two men of military age walk into a tent for
questioning. They were carried to the camp hospital on stretchers two hours
later covered in blood.’
As the assault on west Mosul gathered pace, the
IS strategy of isolating people behind its lines started to falter. The Iraqi
government brought in a mobile phone mast mounted on the back of a truck and put
it up at Nabi Yunus, the Tomb of Jonah, a shrine that IS had blown up as
heretical in 2014, but whose ruins remain the highest point in east Mosul.
Phones in the west of the city started working again and IS was too busy
defending itself against army incursions to hunt down civilians talking on their
mobiles. I knew someone who lived on the east bank of the Tigris: he found he
was able to speak, over a poor connection, to relatives and friends in the
IS-held territory on the other side of the river.
Ahmed Mohsen, trapped
with his mother inside the old city of Mosul, was 31 years old. His father was
dead; he had a married sister living nearby and a brother who was a refugee in
Germany. I asked questions through an intermediary he trusted and he gave
detailed answers about the situation in west Mosul. ‘Dozens of civilians are
killed every day, including children,’ he said. ‘Yesterday, two children were
killed by a mortar shell of the Iraqi army coming from the eastern part [of the
city].’ He derided American and Iraqi government claims that they were using
‘smart artillery’: the incoming fire, he said, was ‘stupid’ and indiscriminate.
It became clear, as the assault on west Mosul went on, that the Iraqi and US
generals were using their massive firepower more freely than they had in the
east. The Americans had expected the siege to take two months from start to
finish; by March it had already gone on for five months, with the heaviest
fighting still to come in the alleyways and closely packed houses of the old
city. By then, according to US Central Command, 774 members of the Iraqi
security forces had been killed and 4600 wounded. The rules were changed: units
on the ground could now call in airstrikes or artillery fire at will to destroy
a building if they believed they had spotted an IS sniper operating from it.
Alongside attacks from the air, Iraqi Federal Police and the Emergency Response
Division, both heavily armed but inadequately trained, used artillery and
rockets – none of them accurate – to pound the densely inhabited buildings
where, even in the final weeks of the siege, 300,000 people were hiding in
stairwells and cellars. Looking later at the ruins of central Mosul, I could see
where shells and rockets had knocked sections off buildings and where bombs had
turned a whole block into a mound of broken bricks. ‘Iraqi forces and the US-led
coalition used imprecise, explosive weapons, killing thousands of civilians,’ as
an Amnesty International report, At Any Cost: The Civilian Catastrophe in West
Mosul, puts it. By the end of March, civilians behind IS lines were being killed
in large numbers by shells, rockets and bombs. They were also beginning to
starve. ‘People in our neighbourhood,’ Ahmed told me, ‘are searching in the
garbage to find something that can be eaten to take it to their children.’
Vegetables and fruit had disappeared from the markets that were still open;
Ahmed and his family had stored some flour and rice, but wanted to keep it as a
final reserve for the children of their extended family.
The coalition
had a lethally over-simplified list of signs visible from the air which
indicated that a building was being used by IS. Ahmed had a tarpaulin draped
over part of his house as a sunshade, a practice fairly common in Mosul, where
the temperature in summer often exceeds 45°C. Disastrously, similar tarpaulins
were being used by IS to cover alleyways or courtyards so that coalition
surveillance aircraft couldn’t see armed fighters moving from house to house.
The coalition had made an announcement that anybody using such a covering would
be attacked as an IS target, but few in the west of the city had heard the news.
On 28 March, a coalition drone flew over Ahmed’s house and dropped a bomb. It
fell on a corner of the building, near a water tank, bringing down a wall near
where Ahmed was standing. ‘I didn’t lose consciousness,’ he said. ‘After a few
moments, I realised I was injured. I partly walked and partly crawled to a small
temporary clinic nearby, but they couldn’t treat my leg properly.’ The medics
said he needed surgery but they didn’t have the equipment for an operation and
could give him only bandages. When we spoke to Ahmed again, he was back at home,
in bed, crying as he talked because of the pain in his injured leg.
When
I wrote about Ahmed for a newspaper report, I changed his name and age and
avoided any detail that might identify him to IS, of whom he was terrified. I
hoped to meet him when the siege was over, though I could see from his own
account that there was a good chance he wouldn’t survive. Mosul had been a
dangerous place for a long time. I was there when Kurdish ground troops backed
by US airstrikes captured it after the US invasion in 2003, and I watched as
order collapsed within hours, as looters ransacked government buildings and
Sunni clerics called from the minarets for people to man the barricades. Over
the next 11 years, neither the Americans nor the Shia-dominated Iraqi government
ever won full control over the city, and in June 2014 a few thousand IS fighters
unexpectedly took charge, defeating an Iraqi government garrison of at least
twenty thousand men. At the time, Ahmed, who came from a poor family, was
driving his taxi between Mosul and Baghdad, a journey of about four hours. His
friends say he was a friendly and generous man, who liked talking to passengers
and who took great care of his car, of which he was proud. He didn’t own it
outright, but had bought a share in it and was saving up to buy the rest. When
IS overran Mosul, travel to government-held areas was still just about possible
and Ahmed went on driving to Baghdad. But a few months later he was arrested by
IS, accused of helping members of the Iraqi police and army to escape the city.
As a friend of his put it, ‘he stayed in prison for three months and was badly
tortured. He would talk a lot about that.’ He was released but could no longer
work, and then he was jailed again for a month and a half. He worried about his
mother: his brother in Germany was able to send back small amounts to support
her but wasn’t officially allowed to work. ‘When Ahmed was freed for the second
time,’ his friend said, ‘he sold his share in his taxi and spent the money over
the remaining two years of IS rule. Recently, he went bankrupt.’
Despite
these disasters, Ahmed and his mother remained optimistic well into the siege
that IS rule wouldn’t last much longer and that things would improve. They
planned to travel to Turkey, where Ahmed’s brother would meet them. This brother
now appears to be the only surviving member of the family; he is trying to get a
death certificate issued for Ahmed, which would entitle him to asylum in Germany
and allow him to get a job. His married sister has disappeared: she is believed
to have been killed in an airstrike, though her body hasn’t been found. This is
far from unusual: at one stage, the Civil Defence Corps in west Mosul had just
25 men, one bulldozer and a forklift truck to search for bodies, estimated to
number in the thousands, buried under the ruins. They haven’t been paid their
salaries by the central government and won’t search for a body unless a relative
can give them a clear idea of where it is.
Ahmed was one of Iraq’s five
or six million Sunni Arabs, politically the dominant community under the rule of
the Ottomans, the British and the Baath Party, though numerically a minority.
But since 2003 the Sunni have been on the losing side in a sectarian civil war
with the Shia who now control the Iraqi state: in 2006 and 2007 the Sunni were
squeezed into small enclaves in Baghdad that one US diplomat described as
‘islands of fear’. IS’s victories in 2014 in Iraq and Syria allowed them a brief
resurgence. But the Iraqi government counterattack, backed by American aircraft,
wrecked their cities, including Ramadi, Fallujah, Baiji and Tikrit, displacing
many from their homes. ‘We are the new Palestinians,’ a Sunni journalist from
Ramadi told me in 2015, predicting a future of flight and dispossession. At the
time, there were half a million displaced Sunni Arabs in Kirkuk Province who
have now been joined by a million people from in and around Mosul.
Most
Sunni would argue that they never voted for IS, couldn’t refuse to co-operate
without being killed, and were often as much its victims as anybody else. But
this isn’t going to save them. Other communities, in both Iraq and Syria,
suspect their Sunni neighbours of collaborating with IS, covertly if not openly.
Sectarian and ethnic hatred runs deep, especially after such IS atrocities as
the Camp Speicher massacre in 2014, when 1700 Shia air force cadets were killed
near Tikrit. Fear of IS ‘sleeper cells’ is pervasive: a Syrian Kurdish commander
advancing with his troops near Hasakah told me that he his two main problems
militarily were the mountainous terrain in which he was fighting and the threat
to his troops from Sunni Arab villagers. Some of them waved nervously at us as
we drove past, but it seemed unlikely that they would be allowed to stay in
their homes for very long. In Iraq, Sunni tribal leaders are expelling ‘Daesh
families’ to underline their loyalty to the Iraqi state. Sectarian and ethnic
cleansing is sweeping away Sunni communities across northern Iraq and
Syria.
The battle for Mosul – where IS had declared its caliphate – was
always going to be bloody. But the fight was even more destructive than anyone
expected thanks to a number of mistakes made by the Iraqi government and the US.
IS resistance was stronger and their own forces weaker than they imagined.
Haider al-Abadi, Iraq’s prime minister, was convinced that people in Mosul would
rise up against IS when given the chance, so as the siege came into operation
locals were discouraged from leaving the city. But IS had a well-organised and
ferocious security apparatus: anyone who showed signs of resistance was killed.
And then there was its military expertise: it defended Mosul with a combination
of snipers, suicide bombers, mines, mortars and booby traps. Swiftly moving from
position to position, IS fighters inflicted heavy casualties on pro-government
forces and minimised its own losses despite its enemy’s overwhelming superiority
in firepower. The Iraqi government’s Counterterrorism Service, the division of
between eight and ten thousand highly trained men who did the bulk of the
fighting in east Mosul, suffered a casualty rate of between 40 and 50 per cent.
Losses as heavy as this could not be sustained for long.
After east Mosul
was finally won, the strategy for regaining the city west of the Tigris was
revised. West Mosul had a larger population than the east – 750,000 compared to
the east’s 450,000, according to a UN estimate – and the buildings were more
tightly packed and easier to defend: many alleyways in the old city were so
narrow that two people couldn’t walk abreast. Already short of combat troops,
the Iraqi government and the US-led coalition decided to rely much more heavily
on firepower than it had in the first phase of the siege. The Federal Police and
the Emergency Response Division played a bigger part in the fighting, using
mortars, artillery and rockets. Grad missiles – Soviet weapons from the 1960s –
were fired in volleys of forty at a time from the back of vehicles in the
general direction of IS-held territory. Locally made rocket-assisted munitions,
with warheads weighing between 90 and 140 kg, were fired into what was becoming
one of the most densely populated patches of ground on earth. Even before the
government offensive began, IS had been forcing people from their homes in the
villages around Mosul and busing them into the city. As IS’s territory shrank
under the government forces’ onslaught, it compelled civilians at gunpoint to
retreat deeper into the IS enclave: snipers killed anyone who tried to flee
behind government lines; the metal doors of houses were welded shut; those
caught escaping were hanged from electric pylons; survivors speak of 75 or more
people being gunned down at one time by IS patrols as they tried to run
away.
Nobody knows for sure how many civilians were killed in the city as
a whole. For long periods, shells, rockets and bombs rained down on houses in
which as many as a hundred people might be sheltering. ‘Kurdish intelligence
believes that over forty thousand civilians have been killed as a result of
massive firepower used against them,’ Hoshyar Zebari, Iraq’s former foreign
minister, told me. People have disputed that figure, but bear in mind the sheer
length of the siege – 267 days between 17 October 2016 and 10 July 2017 – and
the amount of ordnance fired into a small area full of people. The Iraqi
government ludicrously claims that more of its soldiers died than civilians, but
refuses to disclose the number of military casualties and has banned the media
from west Mosul. On his website Musings on Iraq, Joel Wing gives a figure of
13,106 civilian fatalities based on media and other reports, but adds that ‘the
real number of casualties from the fighting in Mosul is much higher.’ The Civil
Defence Force, looking only for bodies that relatives have located, is still
delivering between thirty and forty of them to the city morgue every day. The UN
says that out of 54 residential areas in west Mosul, 15, containing 32,000
houses, were completely destroyed; 23 areas lost half their buildings; and even
in the 16 areas that were ‘lightly damaged’ some 16,000 houses are in
ruins.
All the people I was in contact with inside the IS-held part of
the old city are dead. Ahmed Mohsen was wounded by a drone and then killed by an
IS sniper; his mother and sister have disappeared and are presumably dead. I was
also in touch with Rayan Mawloud, a 38-year-old businessman with a wife and two
children who had a trading company based in a shop in one of Mosul’s markets. He
came from a well-off family and his father had a fleet of trucks that used to
carry goods to and from Basra and Jordan. When the attack on Mosul began, a
friend of Rayan’s says that he spent his savings buying food to give not just to
his relatives ‘but also to many people whom he did not know’. Rayan, knowing
that his family would probably be shot by IS snipers if they tried to escape,
took the opposite decision to Ahmed Mohsen and stayed with his family in their
house. It was hit in an airstrike on 23 June, killing his wife and five-year-old
son. He remained in the part of the house that was still habitable, but it was
hit by another airstrike on 9 July. He was severely injured and died three days
later.
This article originally appeared in the London Review of
Books.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/08/18/endtimes-in-mosul/
