Survivors of the last major Islamic State battle in Iraq beg for food

On a scorching August afternoon, an angry crowd besieged a mini-truck loaded with meat of two slaughtered cows amidst the ruins of what was the last Islamic State (IS) bastion in Mosul.

 

In a desperate scramble, they grabbed beef from a man standing in the open back of the truck and, after it pulled away, some stayed on to descend on the next one to arrive.

Part of an annual ritual of Eid al-Adha celebrations, the deliveries did little to satisfy people living in the rubble of Mosul's Old City more than a year after IS was ousted in a final battle reduced many inhabitants to homeless beggars.

Since Iraqi forces celebrated victory over IS, life for the Sunni Muslim inhabitants of ancient west Mosul, some of whom welcomed IS's arrival in 2014, has hardly improved. That has left them no happier with the Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad they long accused of treating them like second-class citizens.

 

Many of the Old City's narrow streets remain inundated by wreckage left by the air strikes of U.S.-led coalition forces that helped Iraqi government forces drive out IS after nine months of devastating urban warfare.

The remains of some walls look like they are about to collapse. Many families camp out in tents amid ruins of what used to be their ancestral homes.

In early August, Hazem Mohammed, 52, and his family returned to a heap of debris that used to be his home next to a heavily damaged former football field, a few minutes' walk from deserted ruins still reeking of unrecovered human remains.

Mohammed settled down in a tent pitched outside his old house, affording his family a little shade in the 43 Celsius summer heat. His wife boiled water on an open fire outside the tent with small children playing inside.

The reconstruction plan for Mosul and the whole of surrounding Nineveh governorate targeted 78 projects for 2017-2018 worth 75.5 billion Iraqi dinars ($63.69 million), supplemented by a 135-million-euro ($154.4 million) loan from Germany, according to ReFAATO figures published on Aug. 20.

 

 But experts say rebuilding Mosul alone - which had a pre-war population of 2 million and now has 646,000 homeless - is expected to cost billions of dollars.


REUTERS