Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Associated Press
QAYARA, Iraq
Bayda Muhammad Khalaf followed the government’s advice to stay in her home with her husband and seven children as Iraqi troops advanced near their village outside militant-held Mosul. But after the Islamic State fighters fled and Iraqi troops didn’t appear, their supply of food ran out, and the family had to flee to search for territory firmly under government control.
When the Mosul offensive began a week ago, departing IS fighters warned villagers to stay off the roads and surrounding fields, which the militants had mined. So Khalaf waited until she saw a passing shepherd, and then she and her family made the eight-hour walk out of no man’s land behind a herd of sheep.
“We were starving,” she said. They had watched the start of the offensive on TV and thought Iraqi forces were on the way, but the troops’ progress has been slow, and Mosul’s southern approach is littered with dozens of villages, some with no more than 20 homes.
Mosul, the largest city controlled by the Islamic State group, is still home to more than 1 million civilians. The government and international aid groups fear that a sudden mass exodus will overwhelm the few camps set up on its outskirts.
The massive offensive is expected to take weeks, if not months, and with supply routes cut off by the fighting, many civilians may not be able to stay in place for long. Driven by fear or hunger, many are putting themselves in grave danger and are complicating the campaign to expel the militants from the city, which fell to IS in 2014.
On Monday, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces fought their way inside two villages as they crept closer to Mosul a week into an offensive to retake the Islamic State-held city, but they also faced questions over a suspected airstrike on a mosque that killed 13 people.