Nearly 11,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives in battle to retake Mosul

NewsBharati    21-Dec-2017
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Baghdad, December 21: Some organization, some people believe that through terrorism they can rule the world but ‘no’. Terrorism kills only innocent civilians. Notably, Iraq in the month of July this year declared victory against the most dangerous terrorist group i.e Islamic State group (IS) in Mosul after a months-long battle. During this battle, nearly 11,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives.

 

Between 9,000 and 11,000 Iraqi civilians lost their lives while millions are displaced in the battle to liberate Iraq’s second largest city Mosul. However, the rate is almost 10 times greater than reported before. Victory in Mosul was both strategic and symbolic milestone for Iraqi fighters backed by US-led coalition forces.

The data of the civilians killed was earned from several sources, including Mosul’s morgue and a database kept by Airwars, a non-profit based in the U.K. which keeps track of civilian casualties caused by international military actions in Iraq and Syria.

Interestingly, victory in Mosul brought a worldwide appreciation to the Iraqi fighters. The Mosul city was a last major urban stronghold ISIS-held in Iraq, and this defeat pushed the group back towards its insurgent roots, leaving the group with just a handful of towns and stretches of the sparsely populated desert under their control.

Later, in this month, the Iraqi armed forces issued a statement saying Iraq had been totally liberated from IS. The militant group had seized large swathes of Syria and Iraq in 2014 when it proclaimed a caliphate and imposed its rule over some 10 million people. But it suffered a series of defeats over the past two years, losing Iraq's second city of Mosul this July and its de facto capital of Raqqa in northern Syria last month.