Civilians a target in Mosul battle

Assailed by ISIS, they’re nearly 50% of casualties, U.N. says

Iraqi special forces take combat positions Monday as they advance in eastern Mosul. A United Nations official said the Islamic State is targeting civilians who try to fl ee the city’s militant-held areas.
Iraqi special forces take combat positions Monday as they advance in eastern Mosul. A United Nations official said the Islamic State is targeting civilians who try to fl ee the city’s militant-held areas.

IRBIL, Iraq -- The mortar attack that left Um Yousef blind in one eye and killed two of her children came on the same day that Iraqi forces retook her neighborhood in eastern Mosul from the Islamic State militant group.

"We were supposed to be liberated that day," she said from her hospital bed in the nearby city of Irbil. She asked to only be identified by a nickname to protect her family members still living in Mosul.

Doctors at West Irbil Emergency Hospital said cases like Um Yousef's are on the rise as Iraqi forces continue to make gains against the Islamic State in their effort to take control of Mosul.

The blast of the attack that wounded Um Yousef ripped open her daughter's stomach, killing her instantly. Her son Yousef was hit in the head with shrapnel, and he slowly bled out as they waited for hours for help. As Um Yousef was evacuated by the Iraqi military, her husband stayed behind in Mosul to bury the two children.

"I called him by phone, but he just cries, saying nothing," she said. Her youngest daughter, just over a year old who lost three of her toes to the blast, played in her lap.

When the operation to retake Mosul began in October, more than a million people were estimated to still be living inside the city. While Iraqi forces largely evacuated civilians from cities such as Ramadi and Fallujah that were retaken from the Islamic State last year, in Mosul they told people to stay put.

Since Iraqi forces pushed into Mosul's city limits in November, the fight has seen relatively high numbers of civilian casualties. In the first week of January, the United Nations said, 683 people were injured in the city, and at least 817 were wounded during the last week of December.

"You would expect in a conflict like this that the number of civilian casualties would be around 15 percent, a high of 20 percent. What we're seeing in Mosul is that nearly 50 percent of all casualties are in fact civilians," Lise Grande, the U.N.'s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, told reporters at a briefing last week.

"It's clear that this is because of direct targeting by combatants," she said, explaining that Islamic State fighters are targeting civilians as they try to flee militant-held parts of the city.

Aid groups opened two new hospitals closer to Mosul this month in an effort to see more civilians faster, but West Irbil Emergency Hospital still receives dozens of injured civilians from Mosul every day and is still operating above capacity, said the hospital's administrator, Dr. Lawand Meran.

"We are running out of everything: clean gauze, hospital gowns, even simple saline solution," surgeon Hazhen Mama said.

Mama said his work is often complicated by the fact that civilians without immediately life-threatening injuries must wait days for a security clearance to travel out of Mosul and into Irbil to see a doctor.

"When they arrive here they almost all already have infections," he said.

The slow pace of the Mosul fight has also contributed to the high number of killed and injured civilians. As Iraqi forces slowly push the Islamic State out of the city, neighborhoods remain front lines for longer and it's more difficult for severely wounded civilians to be evacuated.

Iraqi leaders initially pledged that Mosul would be retaken before January, but the conflict now appears poised to last months longer.

After 35-year-old Khalida Ahmed was shot by an Islamic State sniper outside her home in eastern Mosul, she had to wait three days for help to arrive.

"I was standing at my front gate and I didn't feel anything, but I suddenly fell," she said. A man ran over to help her but was also shot and died shortly after, Ahmed said, and began to cry as she told the story. "He was my neighbor's son," she said.

Another neighbor helped her dress her wound to stop the bleeding.

After Iraqi forces retook her neighborhood over the weekend, a Humvee moved her to a field hospital where she was put in an ambulance and taken to Irbil. Now she says she's waiting for surgery to have her hip replaced.

"I don't know why [the Islamic State] shot me," she said, "I didn't have a mobile phone to inform on them, I wasn't resisting them, I'm innocent."

Information for this article was contributed by Salar Salim of The Associated Press.

A Section on 01/17/2017

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