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MOSUL/TIKRIT: Daesh militants attacked a village south of Mosul, killing several people including two journalists, even as they were about to lose their last redoubt in the city to an Iraqi military onslaught, security sources said on Friday.
The assault on Imam Gharbi village appeared to be the sort of diversionary, guerrilla-style strike tactics Daesh is expected to focus on as US-backed Iraqi forces regain control over cities Daesh captured in a shock 2014 offensive.
Security sources said Daesh insurgents had infiltrated Imam Gharbi, some 70 km south of Mosul on the western bank of the Tigris river on Wednesday evening from a pocket of territory still under their control on the eastern bank.
The journalists were killed and two others wounded as they covered the security forces’ counterattack to take back the village on Friday. An unknown number of civilians and military were also killed or wounded in the clashes.
“Iraq is among the top three most deadly countries for the fourth year in a row,” the Committee to Protect Journalists said of 2016.
And Reporters Without Borders, another media rights watchdog, termed it “one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.”
An Iraqi officer said: “It is confirmed that there are more than 10 families kidnapped by Daesh members, among them women and children, and there are martyrs and wounded among the civilians and journalists and security forces.”
The fighting forced the UN-affiliated International Organization for Migration (IOM) to suspend relief operations at two sites where it houses nearly 80,000 people near Qayyara, just north of Imam Gharbi, a UN statement said.
IOM spokesman Joel Millman said local staffers were instructed to stay home and not enter the camps following a curfew and restrictions on movement imposed by Iraqi authorities.
He said six water-tanker trucks commissioned by the Ministry of Displacement and Migration were prevented from entering the Haj Ali camp, where temperatures have reached the low 50 degree Celsius in recent days.
Humanitarian groups have repeatedly suspended operations in and around Mosul since the fight to retake the city from Daesh began last October.
Daesh has clung to a slowly shrinking pocket on the Tigris west bank, battling for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, which forced Iraqi troops to fight house to house in densely populated blocks.
Airstrikes and artillery salvos continued to pound Daesh’s last Mosul bastion on Friday, a Reuters TV crew said.
Adhel Abu Ragheef, a Baghdad-based expert on terrorist groups, said Daesh was likely to carry out “more of these raid-type attacks on security forces to try to divert them away from the main battle,” now in Mosul and then in other areas west of Mosul including near the Syrian border still under Daesh control.
The UN predicts it will cost more than $1 billion to repair basic infrastructure in Mosul. Iraq’s regional Kurdish leader said on Thursday in a Reuters interview that the Baghdad central government had failed to prepare a post-battle political, security and governance plan.
The offensive has damaged thousands of structures in the Old City and destroyed nearly 500 buildings, satellite imagery released by the UN showed.
In some of the worst affected areas, almost no buildings appear to have escaped damage, and Mosul’s dense construction means the extent of the devastation might be underestimated, UN officials said.