By Maher Nazeh and Saif Hameed
CAMP TARIQ, Iraq (Reuters) — Islamic State militants fought back vigorously overnight and parried an onslaught by the Iraqi army on a southern district of the city of Fallujah, the group’s bastion near Baghdad, officers said on Tuesday.
An aid official warned of a “human catastrophe” unfolding in the city, with residents unable to escape.
Soldiers from the elite Rapid Response Team stopped their advance overnight about 500 meters (yards) from the al-Shuhada district, the southeastern part of city’s main built-up area, an army commander and a police officer said.
“Our forces came under heavy fire, they are well dug in trenches and tunnels,” said the commander speaking in Camp Tariq, the rear army base south of Fallujah, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad.
A staff member of Fallujah’s main hospital said they received reports of 32 civilians killed on Monday. Medical sources had reported that the death toll in the city stood at about 50 — 30 civilians and 20 militants — during the first week the offensive which started on May 23.
Fallujah has been under siege for more than six months. Foreign aid organization are not present in the city, but are providing help to those who manage to exit and reach refugee camps.
The latest offensive is causing alarm among these organizations as more than 50,000 civilians remain trapped with limited access to water, food and health care.
“Human catastrophe”
“A human catastrophe is unfolding in Fallujah. Families are caught in the crossfire with no safe way out,” said Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the organizations helping families displaced form the city.
“For nine days we have heard of only one single family managing to escape from inside the town,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “Warring parties must guarantee civilians safe exit now, before it’s too late and more lives are lost.”
Fallujah is the second-largest Iraqi city still under control of the militants, after Mosul, their de facto capital in the north that had a pre-war population of about 2 million.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced the assault on Fallujah on May 22 after a spate of bombings that killed more than 150 people in one week in Baghdad, the worst death toll so far this year. A series of bombings claimed by Islamic State also hit Baghdad on Monday, killing more than 20 people.
Fallujah has been a bastion of the Sunni insurgency that fought both the U.S. occupation of Iraq and the Shi’ite-led Baghdad government that took over after the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in 2003.
It was the first city to fall under Islamic State control, in January 2014.
It would be the third major city in Iraq recaptured by the government after Saddam’s home town Tikrit and Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s vast western Anbar province.
Fallujah is also in Anbar, located between Ramadi and Baghdad. Capturing it would give the government control of the major population centers of the Euphrates River valley west of the capital for the first time in more than two years.
(Reporting by Maher Nazeh and Saif Hameed; Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; editing by Ralph Boulton)
Witnesses tell U.N. that Islamic State use hundreds as human shields
GENEVA (Reuters) — Islamic State forces are reported to be holding several hundred families as “human shields” in the Iraqi city of Fallujah while government forces close in, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday, citing witness accounts.
Some 3,700 people have fled Fallujah, west of Baghdad, over the past week since the Iraqi army began its offensive on the city controlled by militant forces, it said.
“UNHCR has received reports of casualties among civilians in the city center of Fallujah due to heavy shelling, including 7 members of one family on the 28th of May (Saturday),” UNHCR spokesman William Spindler told a news briefing.
“There are also reports of several hundred families being used as human shields by ISIL in the center of Fallujah.”
The accounts come from displaced people who have spoken to UNHCR field staff, spokeswoman Ariane Rummery said.
“Most people able to get out come from the outskirts of Fallujah. For some time militants have been controlling movements, we know civilians have been prevented from fleeing. There are also reports from people who left in recent days that they are being required to move with ISIL within Fallujah,” she told Reuters.
Islamic State militants fought back vigorously overnight and parried an onslaught by the Iraqi army on a southern district of Fallujah, officers said.
Iraqi authorities are holding some 500 men and boys under the age of 12 for “security screening” as they leave the city, a clearance process that can take up to seven days, Spindler said.
“But people are being released after this process and we understand that 27 men were released yesterday (Monday) after being screened,” he said.
(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; editing by Ralph Boulton)
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