Fighting could still be heard in the shattered Old City of Mosul yesterday, six days after Iraq declared victory, as Isis diehards prolonged the death throes of their caliphate.
Their last narrow stretch of Mosul’s historic centre teeters above a steep descent towards the River Tigris. Although only 50 yards wide in places, taking it has proved the hardest part of the nine-month battle to liberate the city.
Yesterday there were more airstrikes against snipers firing from their redoubt.
The fall of the Old City was repeatedly reported last week after Haider al-Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, had prematurely announced its liberation on Sunday, but on Thursday evening heavy fighting was unabated on the front lines.
Daesh, as Isis is known to the Iraqis, harried advancing troops from basement hideouts and an extensive underground network with sniper fire and an apparently inexhaustible supply of grenades.
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Iraqi army soldiers moved warily across the rubble — fearful of hidden gunmen shooting up at them from spider holes, aiming for the groin. They were in no doubt that the mostly foreign fighters had only one goal left: to go on killing until they died.
“They pop up from holes in the ground, like rabbits, shoot at us and then disappear, and they move around too fast for the airstrikes to get them,” a wild-eyed soldier complained.
Lieutenant-General Abdul Ghani al-Assadi, commander of the Iraqi special forces counter-terrorism units, said: “We know most are Russian and French because we hear them talking on the radio but we are actually fighting all the countries of the world here.
“These foreign Daesh never give up. They pretend to surrender but, at the last minute, they blow themselves up.”
Ground forces were so close to Isis that they could hear fighters shouting to each other in foreign languages. One soldier scoffed that their Arabic was so poor they could not pronounce “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) correctly.
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“We had a Belgian Daesh fighter calling us kafir [unbelievers],” said a senior officer, smiling wryly. “Imagine — he came to Iraq to fight us and calls us kafir.”
Iraqi forces said they had arrested Russian, Chechen, Belgian and German Isis members, mostly women, in recent days. A teenage Russian woman, just 17, had been deployed as an Isis sniper. On Friday, a six-year old girl survived when her mother detonated a suicide belt near Iraqi forces.
A handful of fighters captured on the front lines have been executed on the spot, including a Chechen who was shot on Thursday by a large and makeshift firing squad of vengeful soldiers.
Another prisoner, overweight and naked, lay on the bonnet of a Humvee hurtling through Mosul’s ruined streets towards the special forces headquarters.
After such a long battle against a ruthless enemy, most Iraqi troops are in a precarious mental state. They have lost countless comrades, friends and family members and are increasingly horrified by evidence of wanton cruelty inflicted on civilians trying to escape the Old City.
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A video from a dead Isis fighter’s phone, circulating on social media, showed a sniper targeting civilians fleeing towards army positions. The sniper’s intermittent commentary was in Uzbek. He chuckled while he felled civilians and mocked an elderly lady beating her breast in distress and despair after a relative was shot dead beside her.
“I’ll show you what Daesh is,” said Brigadier-General Ammar Jassem, whose unit of the 16th Division of the Iraqi army has been on one of the final front lines.
He opened the screen of a camcorder, which revealed a naked boy, about two years old, writhing on a pile of rubble heated to a clearly unbearable temperature by the mid-morning sun. The corpses of a woman and man lay nearby.
“We tried to rescue the child this morning but a Daesh sniper killed one of my men as he got close,” Jassem said. “We were just 20 metres away, but I can’t risk any more of my troops.”
By 4pm, they had still not been able to reach the child. After five hours in the 44C summer heat, his chances of survival were slim.
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Some civilians are still being rescued. On Thursday, three Yazidi women taken by Isis as sex slaves and a toddler were pulled from the rubble by Iraqi special forces. Later that day, advancing soldiers made contact with 50 Isis family members, mostly foreign, crammed into a tiny underground chamber, from where they refused to move. They would wait for death as the battle raged overhead. “Every day we say it is finished, but every day we are still fighting,” Jassem said.