After
Mosul’s “Liberation,” Horror of US Siege
Continues to Unfold
By Bill
Van Auken
July
18, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- One week after Iraqi Prime Minister Haider
al-Abadi proclaimed the “liberation” of Mosul,
Iraq’s second-largest city, the scale of
destruction wrought during a nine-month,
US-backed siege is becoming clearer, even as
reports mount of collective punishment being
meted out to survivors.
Abadi
presided over a victory parade in Baghdad on
Saturday in which elements of the security
forces marched past the prime minister and other
officials in the Iraqi capital’s heavily
fortified Green Zone. It is a measure of the
state of the country that the parade was not
publicly announced because of security concerns,
with the media learning about it only afterwards
and the population of the city excluded.
Evidence of the death toll inflicted upon
Mosul’s civilian population during the
siege—largely the result of unrelenting US-led
air strikes and artillery bombardments carried
out against crowded neighborhoods, particularly
in western Mosul’s Old City—continues to mount.
Conservative estimates have put the number of
civilians killed at over 7,000. The London-based
monitoring group Airwars documented the deaths
of 5,805 civilians between February and June of
this year. There were undoubtedly many more
deaths that went unreported, not to mention
those killed in the four months preceding this
period, as well of those who died in the intense
assault waged on the area of the city during the
last three weeks of fighting.
Officials in Mosul report that civil defense
workers have already dug some 2,000 corpses from
the rubble created by US 500- and 2,000-pound
bombs as well as heavy artillery shelling and
strikes by attack helicopters.
It is
clear that neither the Iraqi government nor the
Pentagon has any interest in clarifying the
scale of carnage unleashed upon the city.
According to a report published in the
Washington Post Saturday, the grim task of
recovering the dead from Mosul’s rubble has been
relegated to a “25-man civil defense unit with
one bulldozer, a forklift truck and a single
vehicle to carry the corpses.” The Post
reports that the unit has “found hundreds of
people suffocated under the ruins of their
homes” after they were flattened by US air
strikes. Most of the victims are reportedly
women and children.
The
head of the civil defense unit, Lt. Col. Rabia
Ibrahim Hassan, told the Post that he
had asked the government for more equipment and
resources, but had received no response.
While
vast resources were expended by the Pentagon on
organizing the siege of Mosul and providing the
arms and ammunition to lay waste to the city, it
is by no means clear that either Washington or
Baghdad has any plan to mobilize comparable
resources to rebuild it. One Iraqi government
official conservatively estimated that the cost
of rebuilding Mosul would exceed $50 billion.
The
regime in Baghdad was compelled last May to
negotiate a $5.4 billion standby loan with the
International Monetary Fund, which demanded
sharp austerity measures. The country’s economy
contracted 10.3 percent in 2016 as a result of
falling oil prices and the destruction wrought
by war.
The
scale of civilian casualties, the massive
destruction caused by US bombs, missiles and
shells, and the reported use by the American
military of white phosphorous, a weapon
internationally banned for use in populated
areas, all point to a US war crime of historic
proportions.
This
crime continues, as the survivors of the
massacre in Mosul face collective punishment at
the hands of US-backed forces. According to the
International Organization for Migration, the
nine-month siege forced 1,048,044 people to flee
their homes. As of last Friday, according to the
IOM, fully 825,000 remained displaced by the
offensive.
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for the majority of these internally displaced
war refugees is impossible. Many have no homes
to return to as a result of the US air strikes.
Most of the city lacks access to water and
electricity, food is scarce, and schools and
hospitals have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, the wreckage of the city is littered
with unexploded ordnance. It is estimated that
at least 10 percent of the high explosives
dropped and fired into Mosul by the US-led
“coalition” failed to detonate, meaning there
are thousands of bombs and shells waiting to go
off, on top of the booby traps left behind by
ISIS. Experts have warned that it could take a
decade to clear the city of explosives.
Men,
women and children who have escaped from the
destruction of Mosul have been housed in tent
camps, in many cases as virtual prisoners. Women
and children suspected of being family members
of ISIS fighters killed in the siege are being
sent to desolate “rehabilitation camps.”
As for
young men found in and around Mosul, there are
increasing reports of summary executions,
torture and abuse at the hands of the Iraqi
security forces and allied Shia militias. A
video posted on the Mosul Eye Twitter account,
set up by an independent historian in Mosul who
has documented the city’s destruction, shows
members of the Iraqi security forces dragging
men to the edge of a 30-foot parapet, throwing
them off it and then pumping automatic weapons
fire into their bodies. Other disturbing videos
show a gang of soldiers beating a teenager to
death and a member of the security forces
stabbing a prisoner repeatedly in the face and
neck.
The
British Guardian reports that
unidentified corpses are washing up “with grim
regularity on the banks of the Tigris downstream
from Mosul,” with the bodies “heavily
decomposed, most bound and blindfolded, some
mutilated.” Human rights groups have blamed
these killings on Iraqi security forces, which
operate in close collaboration with US Special
Forces “advisors.”
The
same US and Western media that endlessly
denounced last year’s Russian-backed siege of
Aleppo by the Syrian government as a war crime
have, for the most part, chosen to ignore crimes
of a more massive scale carried out against the
people of Mosul.
In the
first instance, the media was mobilized in
defense of the Islamist militias holding eastern
Aleppo because they were fighting as part of the
CIA-orchestrated war for regime change in Syria.
In the second, the destruction of Mosul was
hailed as a “victory” and even “liberation,”
because similar Sunni Islamist fighters had
challenged the US-backed regime in Baghdad.
Nothing could more clearly expose the duplicity
and hypocrisy of US foreign policy in the region
and the functioning of the corporate media as
the obedient propaganda arm of American
militarism.
This article was first published by
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