It’s been months since the Mosul operation began, and – unlike in the coverage of the liberation of Aleppo – Western media have lauded it. But RT has been on the ground in Mosul and discovered more to the story: civilian deaths and damage caused by the US-led coalition's strikes.
21 March 2017
RT recounts the horrifying stories of some of the victims of the battle from Mosul, who suffered from both the jihadists and advancing Iraqi forces, backed by US-led coalition airstrikes.
READ MORE: Whether from ISIS shells or US-led coalition bombs, civilians suffering in Mosul (VIDEO)
RT’s Murad Gazdiev and his crew have filmed parts of western Mosul roughly 1km from the frontline between the US-backed coalition and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). Though the area is now considered to be liberated from IS, it looks like no man’s land, scorched and carpet-bombed.
READ MORE: Price of liberation: Civilian exodus, bombed-out streets filmed by RT in Mosul (VIDEO)
A Ruptly crew captured unique 360-degree footage of a Mosul hospital retaken from Islamic State. Though damaged in house-to-house fighting, the facility still seems relatively untouched in comparison with the lifeless burnt-out vicinity.
20 March 2017
Two United Nations officials appeared on RT on Monday, with both UN secretary general deputy spokesman Farhan Haq and UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) representative Matthew Saltmarsh saying that around 300,000 people are expected to escape western Mosul in a new wave of displacement.
A photo tweeted by the UN Refugee Agency shows a nine-year-old girl from west Mosul clutching her doll.
"I couldn't leave without her," she said, according to the agency.
Iraq's immigration minister, Jassim Mohammed, says the number of displaced people from both sides of Mosul has reached 355,000 since the start of the campaign, Reuters reported.
A total of 180,000 people have fled west Mosul, AFP cited the Iraqi government as saying.
Many civilians fleeing Mosul are having difficulty finding shelter at camps, arriving to find there is no room. They are then being forced to get back onto buses or hire taxis to reach other areas, Reuters reported.
The Iraqi army clashed with Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) militants in the area of Mosul's al-Nuri mosque, also known as the Great Mosque.
A five-year-old girl was the sole survivor of an airstrike on her home in Mosul's Jadeda neighborhood. She is now fighting for her life in the field hospital of Iraq Special Operations Forces.
Warning: GRAPHIC VIDEO
RT's Ruptly crew managed to capture 360-degree footage of an unexploded bomb-laden vehicle reinforced with improvised armor plates that seems to have miraculously survived an airstrike on a house in Mosul.
19 March 2017
A family escaped the ongoing fight in the embattled city and came to the Iraqi Special Operations Forces 2 field hospital in western Mosul. An airstrike had hit a neighboring house and damaged theirs. A sniper stopped them on their way from the area, opening fire and forcing them to return, according to the mother, Am Hamdan.
“There was a sniper on top of a building on that road, I don't know if it was an IS sniper or an army sniper. He said 'go back' and he started shooting at us,” she told Ruptly in a video published Sunday.
READ MORE: Mosul family fleeing airstrike loses 10yo child to IED
The family managed to leave Sunday morning. Their 10-year-old son died during the escape, as the boy was “hit in the blast, both his legs and both his arms.” Am Hamdan’s husband was injured and got treatment at the hospital alongside three other members of the family.
18 March 2017
Two survivors from a collapsed building in Mosul were taken to the Special Operations Forces 2 field hospital on Saturday evening. The father and daughter had reportedly spent two days under the debris. The video shows the man, who suffered severe body and head injuries, being treated by medics. His daughter received minor injuries, but remains in shock. The reason of the collapse is unclear, and the number of victims may be as high as 14, according to a hospital staff member, Jon Rieth. “We had two civilians show up. From what we understood there was a house that collapsed maybe from an airstrike or an IDVP bed don't know what caused the collapse, but there was a collapse of the house or building and there were multiple civilians trapped. I think we are unclear on the number, as I heard, as many as sixteen but those two were alive in that collapsed building for a couple of days,” he told Ruptly news agency.
17 March 2017
Iraqi forces have advanced in the Old City of Mosul, taking control over the Bab al-Saray market and the Al-Basha Mosque, according to a federal police commander.
"Federal police and Rapid Response units imposed their complete control over the Al-Basha Mosque...and the Bab al-Saray market in the Old City," Lieutenant General, Raed Shakir Jawdat, said in a statement cited by AFP.
Conducting a military operation in this part of the city is complicated, as its narrow streets hamper the movement of heavy armored vehicles. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are said to be living in the Old City.
Some of the refugees, who suffered both from IS atrocities and airstrikes in the ongoing battle in Mosul, are trapped at Chamakor camp in the east of the city. Although the civilians escaped the battlefield, they are scared and say their lives have been “messed up” and there is nothing left from their homes.
“I know two children from our neighborhood who have been killed. They were killed. I also know a woman who was killed too and her house was damaged. And she was ‘damaged’ too, so she died, and her two children died too. There are others,” one of the camp residents, Mahmoud, told Ruptly video news agency.
16 March 2017
While the humanitarian situation in Mosul seems to be far worse than the one during the Aleppo liberation, Western media is pursuing a completely different narrative, following the agenda of the Western military circles, Chris Nineham, founder member, and National Officer of the Stop the War Coalition told RT.
“Quite a lot of the media coverage is seen from the point of view of Western interest, from the Western side in any particular dispute. In the case of Aleppo, in general, the western press was siding with the opposition to President Assad,” Nineham said.
“Now the west is in a different position, the West is actually supporting the siege and supporting the intervention party, the Iraqi government, against similar rival forces, not identical, but certainly against some of the forces that were engaged in Aleppo. What happens is the media, unfortunately, tends to replicate the kind of interest and the point of view of the military in the West. … It’s a scandal, it is double standards, it’s hypocritical. There really should be more reportage of what is a humanitarian crisis, a massive humanitarian crisis, which looks as if, according to some accounts, is actually worse than one in Aleppo.”
15 March 2017
Struggle for Mosul will most likely produce a whole new generation of battle-hardened terrorists, first Western journalist to be granted access to territories controlled by the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) Jürgen Todenhöfer believes, as there are still many ways for them to escape the besieged city.
“Mosul will be taken, will be conquered. ISIS will lose Mosul, but this doesn’t mean that this is the end of ISIS terrorism, because most of the terrorists, and we think that now 2,500 ISIS terrorists are fighting there, most of them will escape, like they escaped from Ramadi, Falluja. It’s not very difficult to escape with refugees, they escape through tunnels,” Todenhöfer said. “Mosul is still not completely closed, not completely rounded, as we get from the American Pentagon. There are still ways to leave Mosul. A high percentage will escape, and they will create a new generation of terrorists. … And they will continue to attack targets in the Middle East, and they will continue also to attack targets in Western countries.”
The humanitarian situation in Mosul is dire and getting worse as the military operation intensifies, with refugee camps in the area overflowing, according to Iolanda Jaquemet, spokesperson for Near and Middle Eastern department of International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Since October, people have been mainly fleeing the intense fighting, but recently they are trying to escape famine and severe water shortages as well. “A certain number of camps are filling to capacity as the IOM spokesperson was saying earlier, there’s a steady exodus or steady flow of misery coming out of west Mosul. But at the same time that certain camps are filling up, the new camps are being opened,” Jaquemet told RT.
“Yes, indeed people are arriving in much worse state than those who came out of eastern Mosul last year. People are dehydrated, traumatized, they tell us that they not only fled the fighting but they also fled the lack of food.”
Iraqi troops are firing heavy artillery and rockets in west Mosul, which they earlier pledged to avoid. This is forcing a massive civilian exodus from the Iraqi city, a senior Iraq researcher at Human Rights Watch, Belkis Wille, told RT.
“We are seeing the Iraqi forces starting to use heavy artillery in west Mosul, something they didn't do in the east and they committed not to doing. We’re also seeing them firing inherently indiscriminate rockets... into civilian-populated neighborhoods,” Wille said.
Iraqi forces are closing in on Mosul’s Grand Mosque after recapturing the bridge leading to the IS-controlled Old City, police said, as cited by Reuters.
“Our troops are making a steady advance towards the Grand Mosque and we are now less than 800 meters from the mosque,” a federal police spokesman said.
Dozens of civilians are killed daily in the US-led coalition airstrikes that are battering Mosul, according to the Iraq Body Count project. Among the latest incidents, 25 people died on Monday in coalition strikes and shelling, and 11 people were killed on Sunday, also falling victim to the strikes.
Almost 100,000 Iraqis have been displaced by the battle in west Mosul in the 19 days since February 25, according to the latest estimates by the UN's International Organization for Migration.
Dozens of civilians die daily in US-led coalition airstrikes that are battering Mosul, according to the Iraq Body Count project. Among the latest incidents, 25 people were killed on Monday in coalition strikes and shelling, and 11 people died on Sunday, also falling victim to airstrikes.
UK politician, broadcaster, and writer George Galloway told RT that the Mosul and Aleppo operations were covered by Western media very similarly – with bias and hypocrisy.
“The West is in paroxysms of fake grief about the situation in east Aleppo. As it happens, I know both of these cities very well, and they are entirely comparable, except that Mosul is very much bigger, and western Mosul very much more densely populated. Aleppo was treated as a giant war crime, and Mosul was first of all treated as a boyzone adventure war story.”
British politician and former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone told RT that the issue with the Mosul operation coverage is that most people only get one side of the story.
“The tragedy is of course that most people in the West are just looking at Western channels, and it’d just be a lot better if more and more people would tune in to RT and other foreign channels to actually see a different perspective on the situation. Otherwise, you never know about this, you never know about what’s going on.”
READ MORE: ‘West funded creation of Islamist fundamentalism & terror’ – Ken Livingstone
RT’s Murad Gazdiev, reporting from Erbil, Iraq, said that the situation in Mosul may be an unprecedented catastrophe.
“I was in Aleppo when the battle for Aleppo was at its height, and being here now – talking to all these people running from Mosul, people saying that there’s famine in Mosul, talking about a humanitarian catastrophe, the savage treatment that they’ve had to endure – I can say that it’s perhaps much worse in Mosul than it was ever in Aleppo.”
READ MORE: #MosulSOS: RT penetrates fog of war around civilians’ plight in besieged Mosul
Instead of providing help to innocent civilians, political actors use them for propaganda or see them as collateral damage, believes Elizabeth Kucinich, a documentary filmmaker, and wife of former Congressman Dennis Kucinich who traveled to Syria for a secret peace mission with him and Tulsi Gabbard.
“When it is inconvenient to know about what your side is actually doing in the situation you don’t cover it. We’ve seen very much of this within Syria when the national media and the national government here in the United States have a very different ideological position and therefore cover their stories very differently,” Kucinich told RT. “We need to move beyond that again, we need to look beyond war, we have to deal with the situation intelligently and civilian life has to be of upmost importance and consideration in all actions that are taken.”
The Mosul operation gets completely different coverage in the western media than the Aleppo liberation did, with little reporting on civilian casualties and hardships, Carla Ortiz, a Bolivian documentary filmmaker and the director of the “The Voice of Syria” told RT.
“Whatever the media was covering 24/7 was basically on every wrong move that the Syrian Army, or Russia, or Iran were making. Of course, there were many casualties as well because that’s why it’s a war,” Ortiz said. “But I think about Mosul we don’t have much information about what is really happening. There’s a lot of silence about it, and if you want to find out you have to really go deep in. Also, it’s the US coalition that we’re basically boots on the ground, and we’ve been directing also a lot of the airstrikes. And we don’t know that there’s been a lot of casualties, also of a lot of civilians instead of the ISIS people being targeted.”
14 March 2017
The Mosul operation is now in its final stage, the Iraqi premier said, as cited by TASS news agency.
“Iraqi forces taught the IS a lesson during the Mosul operation; a lesson that they would never forget. The campaign to free the city is going on,” he said, adding that the operation “is at its final stage.”
The premier also said that the number of those displaced is much fewer than previously expected.
The mainstream media is ignoring the tragedy unfolding in Mosul, Russian Foreign Ministry representative Maria Zakharova posted on her Facebook.
“It’s strange that there isn’t a Twitter account of a girl suffering in Mosul. That [CNN anchor and correspondent] Christiane Amanpour isn’t wondering every week how many people died due to the international coalition’s actions in this city. That there are no pictures, hashtags, flashy headlines about the humanitarian catastrophe in Mosul. No real figures, facts, data on those displaced, on tent camps,” the official added.
“There are no demonstrations with posters or expensive flash mobs. There’s nothing. The tragedy is being carefully avoided by the world media,” Zakharova wrote.
READ MORE: ‘More have already fled Mosul than E. Aleppo during liberation’ – Russian FM
The number of refugees fleeing Mosul has now surpassed the number of civilians who have left East Aleppo while it was being liberated, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
“Those who have seen pictures from Mosul cannot help feeling anxiety… More civilians have definitely fled from there than left Aleppo during its liberation,” he said. Sergey Lavrov also drew attention to the media coverage of the humanitarian situation in Mosul.
“When covering the situation in Mosul, journalists have to realize they are responsible for performing their duties properly,” Lavrov said. “The RT channel is objective in its coverage of conflicts around the world. The story on how this or that conflict is unfolding that is presented to the global community would be incomplete without coverage by its correspondents,” he added.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov believes that the humanitarian situation in Mosul is cause for concern, and the international community simply doesn’t acknowledge that.
“I would urge not only our journalist colleagues across the globe who work in conflict areas, but also our UN partners responsible for solving humanitarian issues, to be more objective about what they’re witnessing in this or that crisis zone,” Lavrov said.
“The footage from Mosul that any unbiased person can watch should convince that the situation is really a cause for concern,” the official added.
The number of civilian casualties caused by the US-led coalition in the Mosul is much higher than the figures the media gave for the Syrian and Russian operation to retake Aleppo, the London-based Airwars monitoring group has told RT’s Ruptly video agency.
“Since the assault, first on east Mosul and then west Mosul, began, we have seen just a remarkable change at Mosul, moving from tens of civilians reported killed every week or even every month, to hundreds reported killed every week now by coalition airstrikes,” Chris Woods, Airwars director, said.
During the Aleppo siege, “we saw significant international media coverage. So why is there this difference? Why does [the] international media not want to engage on civilian casualties in Mosul?” Woods asked.
Locals told RT that they don’t believe the US-led coalition’s claims that it is doing everything possible to avoid harming civilians when conducting airstrikes.
“Daesh [Islamic State, IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL] go on the rooftops of the houses and the families don’t know, then the aircraft come and bomb it,” Mosul resident Ibrahim Rfaee told RT’s Ruptly agency, referring to the terrorist group by its derogative Arabic acronym.
He added that the locals had asked the military to be more careful in targeting airstrikes, but to no avail. “There are still families inside the houses and the aircraft keep bombing. They were bombing randomly,” he said.