The Battle and The Battered

Mosul, the last bastion of Islamic State in Iraq, could fall any time to the allied offensive. The human cost of one of the bloodiest battles in recent times has been huge. THE WEEK reports from the danger zone.

- Francesca Mannocchi

At the entrance of the Hasan Shame refugee camp, 20 kilometres east of Mosul in northern Iraq, women fleeing Islamic State remove their niqabs and burqas and hang them on a wire fence. Families torn apart by war are regrouping for the first time in two years. Sisters, brothers and cousins embrace in tears. Many of them had lost contact with each other, while the lucky ones were able to hide cellphones in holes dug into the floors of their homes.

The US-led offensive on Mosul, the last major stronghold of IS in Iraq, began on October 17. As Iraq’s second largest city, Mosul once housed Kurds, Sunni and Shia Muslims and Christians. With most of its residents either displaced or being held to ransom by IS, the city is at the centre of a humanitarian crisis. Relief organisations expect the offensive to create at least one million internal refugees, which will add to the 3.3 million who have already been displaced.

The fate of all of them is in the hands of a mosaic of forces that today are fighting, apparently, for a common cause: the Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga, the Shiite militia Hashed al Shabi, the most dangerous in the field, and several other local militias, each ready to claim their own power.

It was in June 2014 that IS captured Mosul, forcing two Iraqi army divisions to flee the city they were supposed to defend. In two years, IS imposed sharia on the city’s population, forced thousands of Christians to flee their homes, confiscated their money, destroyed their churches and executed all Sunni and Shiite opponents. During his recent visit to Iraq, Filippo Grandi, UN high commissioner for refugees, termed the protection of civilians as the most important component of the military operation to liberate Mosul. The high commissioner’s office will need at least $200 million to effectively deal with the crisis at hand. At the moment, though, funds at its disposal do not exceed 38 per cent of the figure.