Iraq’s victory over Isis in Mosul has been tarnished by accusations that the last areas of the historic Old City to be liberated were little short of killing fields.
Among the rubble of one riverside quarter pulverised by airstrikes, which bulldozers have been attempting to flatten, body parts were still poking from the rubble last week, according to military sources in the city. They suspected that many more bodies lay beneath.
Soldiers searching the remnants of demolished homes for Isis insurgents and weapons boasted that they had killed more than 2,000 militants in this area alone.
Many insisted that all the dead had been Isis forces but several admitted that non-combatants (women and children) were also among the casualties.
Isis had kept thousands of Mosul civilians as human shields inside the Old City, along with their own families.
Advertisement
After the premature announcement of Mosul’s liberation in early July by Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister of Iraq, the country’s armed forces struggled against fierce resistance from Isis. This was mainly conducted from a network of underground tunnels and any means possible were deployed in an effort to finish the battle.
Before press access to the area was severely curtailed last week, journalists saw bulldozers repeatedly driving over rubble that contained many human remains, some of which appeared to be women and children.
A lieutenant in the Iraqi Special Operations Forces who is stationed in the Old City described the situation on Thursday as dire, with corpses rotting rapidly in the summer heat.
Those not being buried fast enough in the rubble were being eaten by wild dogs and cats, he said.
“We are now finding many bodies in houses and basements, including bodies of women and children, many of them foreign Isis members who starved to death or died of thirst,” he said.
Advertisement
Human Rights Watch last week released a scathing report demanding that the United States withdraw support from an Iraqi army division that it accused of carrying out executions.