UN reports wave of Daesh atrocities

The UN said Tuesday it had received reports of dozens of execution-type killings by the Daesh group, including the slaying of 50 former police officers, as Iraqi troops close in on Mosul.

The allegations — which remain “preliminary” — have come from a range of civilian and government sources, who cannot be named for security reasons, said United Nations rights office spokesman Rupert Colville.
The reported atrocities were perpetrated by the extremists between Wednesday and Sunday, while Iraqi forces advanced toward Mosul, Colville said. In a village called Safina, about 45 km south of Mosul, Daesh was blamed for executing 15 civilians before throwing their bodies in a river, possibly to strike terror among other residents.
On Oct. 19 also in Safina, extremist fighters “reportedly tied six civilians to a vehicle by their hands and dragged them around the village, apparently simply because they were related to a particular tribal leader fighting against Daesh,” Colville said.
Iraqi security forces found another 70 bodies riddled with bullet wounds on Oct. 20 in the nearby Tuloul Naser village. Colville said it was not immediately clear who was responsible for their deaths.
And on Saturday, Daesh gunmen allegedly shot dead three women and three girls during a forced march in Rufeila village south of Mosul. The group was killed because they were struggling to keep up, likely because one of the girls who was ultimately shot dead had a physical disability, the rights office said.
The 50 police officers who had been held hostage by Daesh were reportedly executed in a building outside Mosul on Sunday, Colville told reporters in Geneva.
“We very much fear that these will not be the last such reports we receive of such barbaric acts by Daesh,” he said.
He added that all the allegations “need a bit more (investigative) work” before the UN can conclusively say they took place.
Civilians’ escape from draconian rule was grueling and their new living conditions hardly better, but the Iraqis fleeing south of Mosul are only the first of a feared massive exodus.
Qayyarah is not only the main staging base for the huge offensive Iraqi forces launched to retake Mosul on Oct. 17 — it is also where displaced families in the area are converging.
“We walked all night to escape the radicals and just before arriving here, our neighbors were killed in a bomb blast,” said Umm Mahmud, a woman from Hawijah.
Her town lies in an area near Kirkuk on the other bank of the Tigris river. 
She and her family fled to Qayyarah, an area recaptured from the terrorists a few weeks ago and which is now the main hub behind the southern lines of the Mosul battlefield.
There she joined the growing number of people who are fleeing the fighting and two years of brutal rule, traveling in the opposite direction to thousands of forces battling their way northward to Mosul.
“A Daesh member helped us flee. He asked for $100 per person to take us to a nearby village,” said the woman. 
They were then left alone to trek through a minefield planted by the radicals, she said.
Only slightly more than 5,000 people are believed to have fled their homes since the start of the offensive a week ago, but the United Nations believes that more than a million people are still trapped inside Mosul.
When Iraqi forces get closer to the boundaries of the city, aid groups expect a huge outflow of civilians which they fear existing infrastructure simply will not be able to handle. Iraqi forces were inching to within striking distance of eastern Mosul Tuesday as defense chiefs from the US-led coalition met in Paris to review the offensive.
With the Mosul battle in its second week, French President Francois Hollande called for the coalition against the Daesh group to prepare for the aftermath and the next stages of the war against Daesh. Forces from the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS) retook areas close to the eastern outskirts of Mosul.
“On our front, we have advanced to within five or six kilometers of Mosul,” their commander, Gen. Abdelghani Assadi, said.
“We must now coordinate with forces on other fronts to launch a coordinated” attack on Mosul, he said, speaking from the Christian town of Bartalla.
Meanwhile, thousands of men from the Hashed Al-Shaabi paramilitary umbrella group dominated by Tehran-backed Shiite militias were preparing for a push to the west of Mosul. 
The Hashed leadership has ordered “us to assume the mission of liberating the Tal Afar district,” said Jawwad Al-Tulaibawi, spokesman for the Asaib Ahl Al-Haq militia, referring to an area west of the mainly Sunni city.
The Hashed’s mission will be to “cut off and prevent the escape of Daesh toward Syria and fully isolate Mosul from Syria,” Tulaibawi said.

Source: Arab News