The street-by-street battle
against Islamic State for control of Iraq’s second city.
The men of Iraq’s special
forces map their victories over Islamic State (IS) by tracing the scars on
their bodies. “These four bullets were from a sniper in Ramadi,” said one
soldier, lifting his shirt to show a pockmarked torso. A gap-toothed gunner
called Ahmad turned a wrist and revealed his wound, a souvenir from Fallujah.
Their commander’s close-cropped hair has deep furrows, the result of a
rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack in the same city.
Both Ramadi and Fallujah were
retaken from IS this year, which restored the confidence of the Iraqi military
after its humiliating retreat from the terror group. Two years ago, the Iraqi
army ran from Mosul and a caliphate was declared. Now, the soldiers’ task is to
build on their recent gains and liberate the country’s second-largest city.
At the tip of the spear in
Mosul is the Iraqi Special Operations Forces’ 1st Brigade, also known as the
Golden Division. It is commanded by Major Salam al-Abeidi, the man who survived
the RPG attack in Fallujah and led the offensive against IS in Ramadi. He is a
compact figure, a black streak of motion in his special forces uniform, never
at rest. (“He would exhaust 20 soldiers,” said one of his men.) He prefers to
be on the offensive. “It’s when we are in defensive positions that we take the
most casualties,” he told me.
Al-Abeidi does not smile much,
but he enjoys a joke. In his hands is always one of three things: a
walkie-talkie, a can of Red Bull, or a cigarette. His seven-month-old German
shepherd, named Caesar, has recently joined him at the special forces
headquarters. Most of his men, fearless when fighting IS, are terrified of the
puppy.
The major leads from the
front. In the morning, he is on patrol; in the afternoon, he is on the roof
guiding air strikes. One evening, I found him climbing into a
tank, heading out to defend a road. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked.
“Sleep? I drink 20 cans of
this a day,” he joked, holding up the energy drink.
The Golden Division is making
slow but steady progress through the eastern residential neighbourhoods of
Mosul. This city is different from the ones in his previous campaigns, the
major told me.
“Most of the areas we fought
in while in Ramadi were nearly empty of residents,” he said. “Here, it’s
heavily populated, making the security forces very cautious while advancing, so
as to avoid civilian casualties. The enemy uses a lot of car bombs.”
The Zahra (formerly known as
Saddam) and Qadisiya 1 districts of eastern Mosul are the battlegrounds of the
moment. IS has blocked the streets with concrete barriers to impede the Iraqi
military advance, and the Iraqi army has constructed earthen berms with the aim
of slowing down the IS car bombers. The gunfire is constant; so, too, are the
boom and thud of suicide attacks and coalition air strikes.
“Here come the French,” said
al-Abeidi, as fighter aircraft roared overhead while another explosion shook
the eucalyptus and citrus trees of the neighbourhood’s gardens.
On the front line, a four-lane
road separates the Golden Division’s Bravo Company from IS. On the lookout in
an abandoned house, a young sniper named Abbas pointed out a dead IS fighter
lying a few hundred metres away. “Over the last four days, I killed three
Da’esh [the Arabic acronym for IS]. But my buddy, he killed four or five,”
he said.
A car bomb detonated nearby,
the shock wave blowing out what was left of the room’s windows. A French
photographer accompanying us, who had refused to wear a helmet, almost dropped
his cigarette.
Abbas fired into IS territory,
a precaution in case the car bomb was followed by attackers on foot. He
continued: “Here, the difficult thing for us is that IS fighters carry babies
in their arms, and all of them look the same – they have beards.”
Outside, it looked and smelled
like a war zone. Shops had been destroyed and I saw a burnt-out suicide truck
that had crashed into a storefront. The street was littered with the remnants of
another car bomb.
Car bombs are the IS
equivalent of cruise missiles. The militants have no aircraft, so they rig up
and deploy these heavily armoured high explosives on wheels instead. The unit I
was with had at least two a day aimed at it. They move fast and are often
hidden, lying in wait. Only when the military think that a neighbourhood is
clear do they appear, driven at speed and often with deadly precision.
None of the forces fighting IS
– the Iraqi army, the Kurdish peshmerga, the Shia militias – releases casualty
numbers. If any ever does, these will show that many of their men were killed
by car bombs.
To avoid the militants’ RPGs
and sniper fire, Bravo Company created rat runs through homes and backyards. My
guide to the front line was called Sergeant Haider. Rooms and upturned domestic
life flashed past us. The sergeant’s Frank Zappa moustache and wraparound
shades were complemented by a grey knitted beanie. He looked like
he should have been snowboarding, not touring a front line.
“There are many more Da’esh
here than in Anbar,” he said, referring to the province where Fallujah and
Ramadi are situated. “Because this area has been under its control for two and
a half years, Da’esh has really taken control. This looks like just the
beginning of [retaking] Mosul.”
Iraq’s prime minister, Haider
al-Abadi, wants Mosul “liberated” by the end of the year. That is unlikely to
happen. It will take a month at least, perhaps more, to make it to the banks of
the Tigris, which runs through the city. And IS is concentrated in the west.
Across the river, there is worse to come.
***
The scar that Rana Ibrahim
Hamad carries is not visible. It is a memory of the baby she lost shortly after
giving birth during IS rule. “I lost the baby because doctors were not
available. The baby had a brain haemorrhage and died,” she told me, standing on
the street. We could hear the sounds of a gun battle nearby but Rana didn’t
blink – she had grown used to it.
It was the first time that
she, her husband, Amer, and their three-year-old daughter, Azel, had left their
home in five days. Until then, the fighting around them had been too
fierce.
Rana was pregnant again and
ready to give birth any day. After detailed questioning by the military, the
family would be allowed to leave for a hospital in Erbil. An armoured Humvee
would be their ambulance.
She told me that she hoped
that having the new child would help her forget her loss. “Life is difficult,”
she said. “We all live in fear. Pain is coming from fear. I pray it gets better.”
In October, I flew over Mosul
with the Iraqi air force. It was not on a combat run, but on a propaganda
mission. Under a bomber’s moon – full and bright – the planes dropped leaflets
by the million, sometimes still in their cardboard boxes, from the side doors
of a C-130 cargo plane. Below, the land was lit up, roads and buildings
illuminated and stretching for miles in the dark. From 17,000 feet, Mosul
didn’t look like a city under occupation. It looked alive.
Later, in its industrial
suburbs, I found a few of the leaflets in the dirt. Some, at least, had found
their target.
“Nineveh, we are coming,” they
proclaimed, a promise to Mosul and the surrounding province. They encouraged
people to stay away from IS buildings. And the Iraqi government told people not
to flee. It feared that there would be a humanitarian crisis if the city,
which has more than a million residents, were to empty.
As Mosul’s fight enters its
second month, however, services are still largely absent. “The army brought us
food and lentils but there’s no government,” said Bushra, a woman from the city
of Tikrit who is now trapped in Mosul. “We are living, but [we have] no water
or electricity. We sleep at eight. We don’t have any services. I didn’t get my
husband’s salary this month. We live off his pension.”
As the men of the Golden
Division move through houses and parts of the city, they find more than just IS
dead, weapons and supplies. They also discover records of rule. Although the
group is cruel and murderous, it keeps tidy books and distributes welfare. We
found dozens of the militants’ ledgers, recording payments made to widows, the
poor and the sick.
***
Across Iraq, senior military
and police commanders complain that Baghdad is not moving fast enough to fill
the gaps left by the fighting, and that although they distribute water, food
and medicine to local people, their men must come first.
In the war against IS, no city
has been bombed more than Mosul. The coalition air strikes come day and night.
The only let-up is during bad weather, which also results in ground operations
being paused.
According to some monitoring
groups, as many as 1,300 civilians have been killed in coalition air strikes so
far. Yet it is Islamic State that is doing most of the killing, through executions
and sniper and mortar attacks. The militants have murdered and continue to
murder hundreds of people inside the city each week.
During one patrol, an IS
sniper pinned down the unit I was with inside a house. One by one, the
soldiers ran to their armoured vehicles – me among them – and to safety. The
bangs sounded especially loud. We soon discovered why. The marksman was firing
armour-piercing bullets. One managed to penetrate the turret of a Humvee and
the gunner inside it was wounded.
Mosul, the beautiful,
once-cosmopolitan centre of northern Iraq, became a mystery under IS. The
fighters cut off its contact with the outside world. At the edge of the city,
I walked through a former IS workshop. There, between 20 and 30 men had
cast and milled mortar shells every day. Thousands of the steel casts remained
in piles, waiting to be finished. The roof of the foundry had been peppered
with shrapnel. IS had tried to conceal the factory from passing aircraft by
burning oil fires through the roof.
It struck me then that the
militants had spent their two years in Mosul with one priority in mind:
preparing for this battle. Who knew how many mortar shells, filled with
explosives, were now inside the city, ready to be fired? This was weapons
production on an industrial scale.
“Isis was scared shitless of
the Iraqi soldiers. Believe me, we saw. They pissed their pants,” said Alaa, an
English teacher who lives near the front line. White flags were hanging from
homes along the street. He described to me the past few days of fighting and
how the Iraqi special forces had arrived in his neighbourhood.
“Now I feel safe, because they
are here,” he said. “And if they need any support, all these people will be
with them. Even the people who were influenced by the Isis talk, now they are
not, because they endured two years of suffering, two years of depravation, two
years of killing, mass killing.”
At the mosque across the
street from Alaa’s house, males over the age of 13 were being lined up for
security screening, to see if they were IS supporters. The soldiers kept their
distance, fearful of suicide bombers. The local people carried their
identification papers. Some had shaved off their beards but others had not.
They did not share Alaa’s optimism, and said they were afraid that IS could
return.
***
Safar Khalil’s wound had no
time to heal and become a scar. The bright red hole in his chest came from an
IS sniper round, his brothers said. A medic tried to plug it with his
finger and stabilise him but the damage inside was too great. Safar’s lungs
were gone.
He spewed out dark, thick
blood. His face was covered in it. And there, in front of me, he
died.
Two of his brothers – one a
small boy, the other a young man – stood screaming nearby. They had left their
home only a few moments earlier to sell eggs. An army sleeping bag was brought
to cover Safar’s face. At first, I thought he was a teenager, because the
blood and gore made it difficult to tell how old he was. On his right hand, he
wore a heavy ring with an amber stone. Afterwards, I learned that he was 26.
They took his body on a cart
back to his home. From inside the house, grief exploded. The women, his
relatives, tried to run out, fear and rage written on their faces. But it
seemed that the sniper was still nearby, so they were pushed back inside
and a family member pulled hard on the metal door to keep them contained.
The women’s voices filled the
neighbourhood. In the middle of the street, looking horribly alone, Safar’s
body lay on the cart. It was not yet safe enough to take him to the cemetery.
There are other fronts in the
war to retake Mosul: the federal police and army are moving in from the south
and may soon retake what is left of the city’s airport. To the west, the
Shia militias of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation Forces have cut off escape
routes to Raqqa in Syria and are on top of the IS stronghold of Tal Afar.
In the north, several towns and villages have been taken by the Iraqi army’s
16th Division and the Kurdish peshmerga.
But it is in the east that
Mosul proper is being cleared of IS militants. Major al-Abeidi’s convoy was hit
again the other day. He sent me pictures of his badly damaged Humvee and
complained that he had lost the car and spilled his energy drink.
“We’ll be at the river in
weeks,” he said confidently. Until then, eastern Mosul and its people will
remain in the maelstrom – surviving not in a city, but on a battlefield.
Quentin Sommerville is the
BBC’s Middle East correspondent
