Baghdad: Daesh militants in the Iraqi city of Mosul were preparing on Sunday night for an assault from government forces by cutting phone lines and banning residents from fleeing the city.
Refugees and those still living in Iraq’s second-largest city told The Daily Telegraph how conditions have deteriorated, as Daesh comes under increasing pressure.
“You have to bring a guarantor to say you will come back in 10 days,” said Gazwan, a Mosul resident recently arrived in Baghdad. He asked for his full name to be withheld. “If you don’t come back, they are punished.”
He said he discovered this new rule after a friend’s mother died because he could not bring her to Baghdad for surgery.
“People are trying to leave Mosul,” he said. “They closed the hospitals because they have no electricity or water.” The decision to impose restrictions on residents who wish to leave the city had not been explained but appeared to be an attempt to stop mass flight.
When Daesh arrived in Mosul in June, many Sunni residents welcomed the group, thinking it would be preferable to the Shiite-led government of the then prime minister Nouri Al Maliki, which they regarded as brutal and sectarian. One immediate advantage was that the bombings carried out by the militants stopped, and the roads were open and safe for the first time for years, Gazwan and other residents said.
Minorities such as Christians mostly fled. Those Christians who did not were given a two-day ultimatum in July to convert or leave. Since then, the group has courted unpopularity even among the Sunni population by imposing harsh rules of conduct and by blowing up the city’s best-known mosque, which was also the tomb of the Prophet Jonah, saying that worship at a shrine was idolatrous.
The subsequent hardships, such as the lack of electricity and the shutdown of the mobile phone network last month, have added to people’s difficulties.
A resident still in the city, who asked not to be named, said that the phones had been cut off as a security measure — Daesh feared residents were phoning in militant positions to the government.
Daesh has begun training young men and boys to join its forces, according to videos the group has released online. Daesh positions around the city have come under attack from air strikes by the US and other members of the coalition.
The Pentagon said the coalition had struck 20 Daesh targets in Iraq, including in Mosul, last week. Iraqi media said 18 Daesh fighters were killed in air strikes near Mosul Dam yesterday. However, there was no sign of an immediate attack on the city.
Government forces, backed by Shiite militia, have made some gains in the past two weeks, including relieving a siege on Iraq’s largest oil refinery at Baiji, between Baghdad and Mosul, but were not thought to have sufficient control of the road further north to launch an assault. The US has implied that it does not think the Iraqi army will be in a position to retake major Sunni Arab areas under Daesh control for many months.
The British Government, in announcing a further deployment of hundreds of troops to Baghdad and Arbil to train local forces over the weekend, also suggested that a delay was likely. Syrian regime forces launched a fresh attack around the village of Handarat, north of Aleppo, over the weekend, according to reports. Further advances in the area would almost certainly cut the last remaining supply road into rebel-held eastern Aleppo.
