Civilian deaths ‘fact of life’ in war on DAESH, says Mattis

A displaced Iraqi girl holds her five-day-old brother as she sits amongst other children in a safe zone after fleeing their homes in Mosul’s western al-Saha neighbourhood during the government forces’ ongoing battle to retake the area from Islamic State (IS) group fighters on May 28. (AFP)

BAGHDAD, May 28, (Agencies): The advance of government troops slowed on Sunday in the last push to drive Islamic State group militants from remaining pockets of Mosul, two Iraqi military officers said. On Saturday, US-backed Iraqi forces began a new offensive to recapture the Old City from three directions. Hours after announcing the push, the government said two military officers were killed in clashes in the Shafaa neighborhood on the Tigris River. IS militants have deployed snipers, suicide car bombers and suicide attackers on foot, the officers said.They described the advance on Mosul’s Old City as “cautious” and the clashes on Sunday as “sporadic” without giving details on casualty figures from either side. The troops captured Ibn Sina hospital, part of the sprawling medical complex in the Shafaa neighborhood, the officers added. They spoke on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. Mosul’s wide-scale military operation was launched in October and its eastern half was declared liberated in January.The push for the city’s west began the following month. The IS hold on Mosul has shrunk to just a handful of neighborhoods in and around the Old City district where narrow streets and a dense civilian population are expected to complicate the fight there. On Friday, Iraqi planes dropped leafl ets over the area, encouraging the civilians to fl ee “immediately” to “safe passages” where they will be greeted by “guides, protectors and (transportation) to reach safe places,” according to a government statement.The UN estimated that as many as 200,000 people may try to leave in the coming days, while Save the Children warned that fl eeing civilians could be caught in the crossfire, leading to “deadly chaos.” Three people were killed on Sunday in a suicide blast in Diyala province, southeast of Baghdad, Iraqi police said Sunday. The police told KUNA that a suicide bomber blew himself up close to a security checkpoint near the main entrance gate leading to the governorate.The attack resulted in the death of three people and the injury of 15 others. The injured were rushed to a nearby hospital for treatment, it added. Meanwhile, Turkey’s military killed 13 members of the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in air strikes in northern Iraq on Sunday, the military said in a statement.The warplanes struck seven PKK targets in the Avasin-Basyan region of northern Iraq, and killed militants believed to be preparing for an attack, the military said. In a separate air strike in Turkey’s southeastern province of Van late on Saturday, the military said warplanes had killed another 10 PKK militants.The PKK, which has carried out a three-decade insurgency in southeast Turkey, has camps in the mountains of northern Iraq, near the Turkish border. It is considered a terrorist group by Turkey, the United States and the European Union. Civilian casualties are inevitable in the war against the Islamic State group but the United states is doing “everything humanly possible” to avoid them, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said in an interview aired Sunday.A US-led international coalition has been carrying out air strikes against the IS group in Iraq and Syria since 2014, and nongovernmental organizations say the attacks are claiming ever more civilian lives. Interviewed on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program, Mattis said that “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation.” But he quickly added that “we do everything humanly possible, consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties — at all costs.”Some NGOs have blamed the rising civilian death toll on a push by President Donald Trump’s administration to accelerate the pace of combat in an effort to “annihilate” the jihadists. But the Pentagon contests both the NGOs’ death counts and the charge that a new sense of urgency under Trump is to blame. “We have not changed the rules of engagement,” Mattis said.“There is no relaxation of our intention to protect the innocent.” The coalition has officially acknowledged responsibility for more than 450 civilian deaths since its bombing campaign began in 2014, including 105 in the Iraqi city of Mosul on March 17. However, Airwars — a Londonbased collective of journalists and researchers that tracks civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria — reports that coalition strikes have killed at least 3,681 people.Although the Pentagon on Thursday acknowledged that an American bombing attack in Mosul on March 17 claimed at least 105 civilian lives, it blamed munitions stored by the jihadists in the houses targeted. That, Mattis said Sunday, showed “once again the callous disregard that is characterized by every operation they have run.”