Mosul
Families Complain Overuse of Airstrikes Killed
Thousands
Many bodies are still buried in the rubble with
parts of the city inaccessible thanks to streets
choked with debris, writes Patrick Cockburn in
the latest of his series from Iraq
By Patrick Cockburn
July 13,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- “There
were very few Daesh [Isis fighters]
in our neighbourhood, but they dropped a lot of
bombs on them,” says Qais, 47, a resident of the
al-Jadida district of Mosul.
“We reckon that the airstrikes here killed
between 600 and 1,000 people.”
He shows
pictures on his phone of a house that had stood
beside his own before it was hit by a bomb or
missile that had reduced it to a heap of
smashed-up bricks. “There were no Daesh in the
house,” says Qais. But there were seven members
of the Abu Imad family living there, of whom
five were killed along with two passers-by.
People in
west Mosul say that the intensity of the
bombardment from the air was out of all
proportion to the number of Isis fighters on the
ground. Saad Amr, a volunteer medic, worked in
both east and west Mosul during the nine-month
siege. He says that “the airstrikes on east
Mosul were fewer but more accurate, while on the
west there were far more of them, but they were
haphazard.”
Nobody
knows how many civilians died in Mosul because
many of the bodies are still buried under the
rubble in 47 degrees heat. Asked to estimate how
many people had been killed in his home district
of al-Thawra, Saad Amr said: “we don’t know
because houses were often full of an unknown
number of displaced people from other parts of
the city.”
Some
districts are so badly damaged that it is
impossible to reach them. We heard that there
had been heavy airstrikes on the districts of
Zanjily and Sahba and, from a distance, we could
see broken roofs with floors hanging down like
concrete flaps. But we could not get there in a
car because the streets leading to them were
choked with broke masonry and burned out cars.
Local
people accuse the US-led coalition of massive
overuse of force, though they agree that Isis
forced people into houses in combat zones and
murdered them if they tried to flee. The
sighting of a single sniper on a roof, would
lead to a whole building being destroyed along
with the families inside them. A sign that Isis
was not present in any numbers is that, while
there are bombed out buildings in every street,
there are surprisingly few bullet holes in the
walls from automatic rifles or machine guns. In
cities like Homs in Syria today or Beirut during
the civil war, wherever there had been street
fighting of any intensity, walls were always
pock-marked with bullet holes.
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The accusations of Mosul
residents interviewed by The
Independent are backed-up by an Amnesty
International report called At
Any Price: The Civilian Catastrophe in West
Mosul. It says that civilians were
subjected “to a terrifying barrage of fire from
weapons that should never be used in densely
populated civilian areas.” AI researchers
interviewed 151 west Mosul residents, experts
and analysts, and documented 45 attacks in
total, which killed at least 426 civilians and
injured more than 100. This was only a sample of
thousands of air attacks on the city, some of
which are still going on. Throughout the day in
Mosul there has been the periodic thump of more
bombs landing in the corner of the Old City
still held by Isis.
Even where
bombs hit their targets, they were often more
likely to kill civilians than Isis fighters. For
example, AI says that “on 17 March 2017 a US
airstrike on the Mosul al-Jadida neighbourhood
killed at least 105 civilians in order to
neutralise two Isis snipers. Regardless of
whether – as the US Department of Defense has
maintained — secondary explosions occurred, it
should have been clear to those responsible that
the risk posed to civilians by using a 500lb
bomb was clearly excessive in relation to
anticipated military advantage.” This is the
only such incident Mosul to be investigated by
the US military, although the US say they always
take precautions to reduce civilian casualties.
The Isis
defended Mosul for nine months instead of the
two months expected by the US military by
adopting special tactics. Isis commanders relied
heavily on snipers who would move swiftly from
house to house. The three Iraqi government elite
combat units, the Counter-Terrorism Service,
Emergency Response Division and the Federal
Police, that bore the brunt of the battle, had
too few troops to fight house to house. When
faced with resistance, they invariable called in
air attacks.
The
consequence of this was explained to AIby
Mohamed from al-Tenak neighbourhood in west
Mosul: “The strikes targeted the Isis snipers. A
strike would destroy an entire house of two
storeys.”
Civilian
loss of life was so horrific in west Mosul
because Isis was merciless in using civilians as
human shields. Thousands were herded from their
villages in the outskirts into the combat zones
and shot or hanged if they tried to escape.
Metal doors were welded shut and other exits
booby trapped. Those who were caught escaping
were hanged from electricity pylons. As Iraqi
government forces advanced and Isis retreated,
the civilians were squeezed into a smaller area
where a single bomb would kill the large numbers
of people crammed together.
Isis will
be even further weakened after the loss of Mosul
if fresh reports turn out to be true that its
leader Abu Baqr al-Baghdadi was killed earlier
in the year. The Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights says that it has “confirmed information”
that he is dead as the Russia’s Defence Ministry
had claimed in June. It said that it might have
killed him when one of its airstrikes hit a
gathering of Isis commanders on the outskirts of
the Syrian city of Raqqa.
“We have
confirmed information from leaders, including
one of the first rank who is Syrian, in the
Islamic State in the eastern countryside of Deir
al-Zor,” said Rami Abdulrahman, the director of
the British-based group. The source did not say
when or how Baghdadi had died.
This
article was first published by
The Independent
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
