Over 28,000 Iraqis flee West Mosul fighting

Iraq’s Joint Operations Command announced later Wednesday that CTS had recaptured Maamun Flats.

The damage in the Maamun area is heavy, with homes destroyed, roads cratered and rows of crumpled cars, some of them piled one on top of another.

Fleeing Mosul residents have spoken of dire conditions inside the city.

“We’re so hungry, we haven’t eaten almost anything in four days,” said Widaa, a 20-year-old who fled Maamun.

“There was firing all around our house, it was being destroyed bit by bit,” she said.

The drive to retake west Mosul—the smaller but more densely populated side of a city split by the Tigris River—began on February 19, after Iraqi troops retook its east side the previous month.

Sniper fire is a significant danger in Maamun, said Kathy Bequary, the executive director of NYC Medics, a group providing emergency care from a mobile clinic.

“We’re seeing a lot of serious gunshot wounds from snipers,” Bequary told AFP.

“Most of our patients are combatants, but civilians are affected too. Two days ago, we treated a family—a mother, father, son and daughter—who were trying to escape Mosul and were targeted by snipers,” she said.

“The five-year-old daughter was shot in the pelvis, a through and through wound. The girl was very, very critical.”

IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, announcing a “caliphate” incorporating swathes of Iraq and Syria.

While security forces initially performed dismally, they have since retaken most of the territory they lost, with backing from US-led air strikes and other support.

IS has also lost significant ground in Syria, and while it still holds the city of Raqa and some territory in western Iraq in addition to in Mosul, the jihadists’ “state” is crumbling.

The operation to retake Mosul was launched on October 17, involving an array of sometimes rival security forces and paramilitary groups.