The catastrophic number of civilian casualties in Mosul is receiving little attention internationally from politicians and journalists. This is in sharp contrast to the outrage expressed worldwide over the bombardment of east Aleppo by Syrian government and Russian forces at the end of 2016. Hoshyar Zebari, the Kurdish leader and former Iraqi finance and foreign…
More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the devastating battle to retake Mosul from ISIS, according to intelligence reports revealed exclusively to The Independent – a death toll far higher than previous estimates. Residents of the besieged city were killed by Iraqi ground forces attempting to force out militants, as well as by air strikes…
Iraqi security forces kill ISIS prisoners because they believe that if the militants are sent to prison camps they will bribe the authorities in Baghdad to release them. “That is why Iraqi soldiers prefer to shoot them or throw them off high buildings,” says one Iraqi source. A former senior Iraqi official said he could…
Dozens of captured cars, modified “Mad Max-style” by Islamic State terrorists into either combat vehicles or suicide bombs on wheels, have been put on display by Iraqi security forces in the liberated city of Mosul. The exhibition show was launched at the Federal Police Headquarters in Hamam al-Qalil neighborhood in the northern Iraqi city of…
“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…
Iraq’s Prime Minister formally declared victory over Isis in the northern city of Mosul, saying their defeat marks the “collapse” of the self-proclaimed caliphate. “I announce from here the end and the failure and the collapse of the terrorist state of falsehood and terrorism which the terrorist Daesh announced from Mosul,” Haider al-abadi said in a speech…
