The UN said Friday that ISIS terrorist group may be holding more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians as human shields in the Old City of Mosul.
The UN said Friday that ISIS terrorist group may be holding more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians as human shields in the Old City of Mosul.
Iraqi forces are fighting to retake Mosul from ISIS, after the terrorist group overran the city in 2014, imposing its brutal rule on its inhabitants.
The UN refugee agency’s representative in Iraq Bruno Geddo said ISIS had been capturing civilians in battles outside of Mosul and had been forcing them into the Old City, one of the last parts of the city in their grip, AFP reported.
“More than 100,000 civilians may still be held in the Old City,” Geddo told reporters in Geneva.
“We know that [ISIS] moved them with them as they left… Locations where the fighting was going on,” he said.
“These civilians are basically held as human shields in the Old City.”
With virtually no food, water or electricity left in the area, the civilians are “living in an increasingly worsening situation of penury and panic,” he said.
Since the battle to retake Mosul began nine months ago, an estimated 862,000 people have been displaced from the city, although 195,000 have since returned, mainly to the liberated east of the city.
