MOSUL, Iraq -- Chaos broke out in eastern Mosul on Sunday when hundreds of civilians overwhelmed aid trucks distributing food and water.
The Iraqi government, hoping to avoid large-scale displacement, has called on Mosul's residents to stay in their homes during the operation to retake the city from the Islamic State extremist group. But as progress on the ground slows, hundreds of thousands of residents are now stuck with dwindling food and water supplies.
The Iraqi government on Sunday sent truckloads of food, heating oil and drinking water to residents in areas retaken from the Islamic State, but few of the trucks could make it to civilians trapped near front-line fighting.
"There is no justice," Abu Ahmed said during a chaotic distribution in the Samah neighborhood on the eastern edge of Mosul. "Some people took so many bags of food, and others got nothing." He asked that his full name not be used because of security concerns.
While the trucks bore banners identifying them as distributing aid on behalf of the local government, there were no government or security officials present in Samah during the melee that ensued.
Men, women and children fought over bags of flour and baskets of apples.
"We are desperate. This is the first time I've seen aid trucks," Abu Ahmed said. He said the food and water that residents had stockpiled before the start of the operation had run out.
At one point, Iraqi soldiers fired into the air in an attempt to clear the street to make way for ambulances carrying casualties from the front.
Younis Shamal, a teenager from Mosul, watched as the crowds fighting over food and water scattered. "Our lives used to be very normal. We would just go to work and come home at the end of the day," he said. "This has turned us into uncivilized people."
More than six weeks in, the battle for Mosul is proceeding slowly, with Iraqi forces battling street by street against heavily armed militants who have launched scores of suicide car bomb attacks.
In the Shaimaa neighborhood, soldiers and Islamic State fighters exchanged heavy gunfire as Iraqi forces tried to advance down narrow residential streets. Islamic State militants shelled the district with a heavy barrage of mortar rounds, according to reporters at the scene.
Diaa Sallal, a senior Iraqi relief official, said the supplies were being delivered to the towns of Bartella and Qayara, near Mosul, as well as two outlying Mosul neighborhoods. Sallal, reached by telephone in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, gave no further details.
Scores of families continue to brave the ongoing fighting to flee Islamic State-held districts for the relative safety of neighborhoods retaken by government troops or camps outside the city that hold the displaced.
Deeper inside Mosul, Iraqi special forces set up a tight security perimeter around a more organized aid distribution in the Bakr neighborhood. Hundreds of men and women lined up along a residential street as Iraqi special forces handed out boxes of aid.
But with the front line just over 100 yards away, only a small number of aid trucks could reach the neighborhood.
Soldiers screened the civilians as gunfire echoed nearby. Ambulances and armored vehicles carrying wounded soldiers went screaming past after an Islamic State suicide car bomb struck a nearby army position.
Elsewhere in Iraq, security forces in the northern Kurdish region shot and killed two of four people who resisted arrest in a village near the Iranian border. Nasah Mala Hassan, the mayor of a nearby town, said the other two blew themselves up and that an armed Kurdish civilian was killed. It was not immediately clear whether the people were members of an armed group.
Information for this article was contributed by Sinan Salaheddin and Salar Salim of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/05/2016