A British aid worker has described the scenes of “Armageddon” that greeted her in Mosul after a nine-month battle to retake the city from Islamic State.
Madiha Raza, 29,who works for Muslim Aid, a charity based in Britain, said that the “entire city is just completely obliterated, it is like a movie set. What you can’t feel in the photos or smell is the death, sewage and smoke. It is a catastrophic situation.”
This month Iraq’s second biggest city was declared free from Isis after three years by Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister.
Muslim Aid’s workers are handing out food and water after they evacuated people to safer areas near checkpoints and are providing portable lavatories.
Ms Raza, from Northwood, in the London borough of Hillingdon, helped at one the charity’s distribution centres. She also visited Hamam al-Alil, a camp in which more than 8,000 families are living in a “sea of tents”, and a former primary school bombed by Isis.
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“There were still bodies under the rubble, which hadn’t been cleared, and little tiny backpacks and shoes. Walking through that was horrific,” she said. “I couldn’t see them [the bodies] but knowing they were there, it was completely surreal. People went there to shelter when the neighbourhood was being bombed by Isis because they thought Isis wouldn’t bomb a school.
Ms Raza said that she kept a little shoe she found in the ruins of the school and described how there were also “toys everywhere”.
“I don’t have the words to describe it, actually. The school was the most powerful reminder of everything,” she said.
Ms Raza also described conversations she had had with people living under Isis. She said she heard how some were used as human shields by the group’s fighters and “how easily they dished out punishments”.
“There was a woman who told me that she was cleaning the porch of her house, and covered head to toe, but they told her she was not wearing the traditional black abaya,” she said. “But they beat her for it.
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“There was another little girl, she was 11 years old and her name was Wafa, she told us her brother was shot by a sniper. He was only 14, but he was helping people escape and they shot him for that.
“Hearing it straight from the horse’s mouth was something else. They just don’t discriminate — child, man, woman, it doesn’t matter.”
Ms Raza said that reconstruction, education, medical, water and sanitation were the things most desperately required on the ground. “There is a lot to be done,” she added.