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Exclusive: Islamic State crushes rebellion plot in Mosul as army closes in

By Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Islamic State has crushed a rebellion plot in Mosul, led by one of the group’s commanders who aimed to switch sides and help deliver the caliphate’s Iraqi capital to government forces, residents and Iraqi security officials said.

Islamic State (IS) executed 58 people suspected of taking part in the plot after it was uncovered last week. Residents, who spoke to Reuters from some of the few locations in the city that have phone service, said the plotters were killed by drowning and their bodies were buried in a mass grave in a wasteland on the outskirts of the city.

Among them was a local aide of IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who led the plotters, according to matching accounts given by five residents, by Hisham al-Hashimi, an expert on IS affairs that advises the government in Baghdad and by colonel Ahmed al-Taie, from Mosul’s Nineveh province Operation Command’s military intelligence.

Reuters is not publishing the name of the plot leader to avoid increasing the safety risk for his family, nor the identities of those inside the city who spoke about the plot.

The aim of the plotters was to undermine Islamic State’s defense of Mosul in the upcoming fight, expected to be the biggest battle in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Mosul is the last major stronghold of Islamic State in Iraq. With a pre-war population of around 2 million, it is at least five times the size of any other city Islamic State has controlled. Iraqi officials say a massive ground assault could begin this month, backed by U.S. air power, Kurdish security forces and Shi’ite and Sunni irregular units.

A successful offensive would effectively destroy the Iraqi half of the caliphate that the group declared when it swept through northern Iraq in 2014. But the United Nations says it could also create the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, in a worst case scenario uprooting 1 million people.

Islamic State fighters are dug in to defend the city, and have a history of using civilians as human shields when defending territory.

CAUGHT

According to Hashimi, the dissidents were arrested after one of them was caught with a message on his phone mentioning a transfer of weapons. He confessed during interrogation that weapons were being hidden in three locations, to be used in a rebellion to support the Iraqi army when it closes in on Mosul.

IS raided the three houses used to hide the weapons on Oct. 4, Hashimi said.

“Those were Daesh members who turned against the group in Mosul,” said Iraqi Counter-terrorism Service spokesman Sabah al-Numani in Baghdad, using an Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “This is a clear sign that the terrorist organization has started to lose support not only from the population, but even from its own members.”

A spokesman for the U.S.-led military coalition which conducts air strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq was unable to confirm or deny the accounts of the thwarted plot.

Signs of cracks inside the “caliphate” appeared this year as the ultra-hardline Sunni group was forced out of half the territory it overran two years ago in northern and western Iraq.

Some people in Mosul have been expressing their refusal of IS’s harsh rules by spray-painting the letter M, for the Arabic word that means resistance, on city walls, or “wanted” on houses of its militants. Such activity is punished by death.

Numani said his service has succeeded in the past two months in opening contact channels with “operatives” who began communicating intelligence that helped conduct air strikes on the insurgents’ command centers and locations in Mosul.

A list with the names of the 58 executed plotters was given to a hospital to inform their families but their bodies were not returned, the residents said.

“Some of the executed relatives sent old women to ask about the bodies. Daesh rebuked them and told them no bodies, no graves, those traitors are apostates and it is forbidden to bury them in Muslim cemeteries,” said one resident whose relative was among those executed.

“After the failed coup, Daesh withdrew the special identity cards it issued for its local commanders, to prevent them from fleeing Mosul with their families,” Colonel al-Taie said.

A Mosul resident said Islamic State had appointed a new official, Muhsin Abdul Kareem Oghlu, a leader of a sniper unit with a reputation as a die-hard, to assist its governor of Mosul, Ahmed Khalaf Agab al-Jabouri, in keeping control.

Islamic State militants have placed booby traps across the city of Mosul, dug tunnels and recruited children as spies in anticipation of the offensive.

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; editing by Peter Graff)

Oil prices fall back from one year highs hit by OPEC deal concerns

A worker checks the valve of an oil pipe at an oil field owned by Russian state-owned oil producer Bashneft near the village of Nikolo-Berezovka, northwest of Ufa, Bashkortostan, Russia

By Amanda Cooper

LONDON (Reuters) – Oil fell back from one-year highs on Tuesday, knocked by concerns that a production cut by the world’s largest exporters might not be enough to erode a two-year old global surplus of unwanted crude oil.

Oil prices jumped as much as 3 percent on Monday, after Russia and Saudi Arabia both said a deal between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and non-OPEC members like Russia in curbing crude output was possible.

December Brent crude oil futures were down 42 cents at $52.72 a barrel by 1100 GMT, below Monday’s one-year high at $53.73, but off an intraday low at $52.51, while U.S. futures were down 43 cents at $50.92 a barrel.

Global oil supply could fall into line more quickly with demand if OPEC and Russia agree to a steep enough cut in production, but it is unclear how rapidly this might happen, the International Energy Agency said on Tuesday.

“The word I look at is ‘if’,” Saxo Bank senior manager Ole Hansen said. “OPEC’s compliance (track record) with its own limits is not good.

“What it all adds up to is an increased belief that a firm bottom has been established, but as the market moves higher the risk of self-defeat rises as it opens the door right open for the return of production growth among high-cost producers,” he said.

Igor Sechin, Russia’s most influential oil executive and the head of the Kremlin’s industry champion Rosneft, said his company will not cut or freeze oil production as part of a possible agreement with OPEC.

“Underlying scepticism that global oil producers will succeed in taking coordinated action to support prices is therefore alive and well,” PVM Oil Associates analyst Stephen Brennock said in a note.

“Meanwhile, of those that do see a chance of a genuine output deal, they still need convincing that the proposed cuts will go far enough to address the supply imbalance.”

Goldman Sachs said in a note to clients on Tuesday that despite a production cut becoming a “greater possibility”, markets were unlikely to rebalance in 2017.

“Higher production from Libya, Nigeria and Iraq are reducing the odds of such a deal rebalancing the oil market in 2017,” the U.S. bank said, and added that even if OPEC producers and Russia implemented strict cuts, higher prices would allow U.S. shale drillers to raise output.

Adding to the drag on oil, the dollar rallied to its highest in 11 weeks, lifted by rising expectations that the Federal Reserve could raise U.S. interest rates by the end of the year.

(Additional reporting by Henning Gloystein in Singapore; Editing by Louise Heavens, Greg Mahlich)

Baghdad bridles at Turkey’s military presence, warns war

Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi of Iraq addresses the United Nations General Assembly in the Manhattan borough of New York, U.S.,

By Maher Chmaytelli and Tuvan Gumrukcu

BAGHDAD/ANKARA (Reuters) – Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has warned Turkey that it risks triggering a regional war by keeping troops in Iraq, as each summoned the other’s ambassador in a growing row.

Relations between the two regional powers are already broadly strained by the Syrian civil war and the rise of the Islamic State militant group.

Turkey’s parliament voted last week to extend its military presence in Iraq for a further year to take on what it called “terrorist organizations” – a likely reference to Kurdish rebels as well as Islamic State.

Iraq’s parliament responded on Tuesday night by condemning the vote and calling for Turkey to pull its estimated 2,000 troops out of areas across northern Iraq.

“We have asked the Turkish side more than once not to intervene in Iraqi matters and I fear the Turkish adventure could turn into a regional war,” Abadi warned in comments broadcast on state TV on Wednesday.

“The Turkish leadership’s behavior is not acceptable and we don’t want to get into a military confrontation with Turkey.”

Turkey says its military is in Iraq at the invitation of Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish regional government, with which Ankara maintains solid ties. Most of the troops are at a base in Bashiqa, north of Mosul, where they are helping to train Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga and Sunni fighters.

Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Numan Kurtulmus, said the deployment had become necessary after Islamic State’s seizure of Iraq’s second city, captured in 2014

“Neither Turkey’s presence in Bashiqa nor its operation right now in Syrian territory are aimed at occupying or interfering with the domestic affairs of these countries.”

Iraq’s central government in Baghdad says it never invited such a force and considers the Turkish troops occupiers.

MOSUL TENSIONS

Tensions between Iraq and Turkey have risen with expectations of an offensive by Iraq and U.S.-backed forces to retake Mosul.

Turkey has said the campaign will send a wave of refugees over its border and, potentially, on to Europe.

Ankara worries that Baghdad’s Shi’ite Muslim-led forces will destabilize Mosul’s largely Sunni population and worsen ethnic strife across the region, where there are also populations of Turkmens, ethnic kin of the Turks.

Turkey is also uncomfortable with the arrangement of Kurdish forces expected to take part in the offensive.

In northern Syria, where Turkey is backing rebels fighting Islamic State, Ankara has warned that Kurdish militias are “filling the vacuum” left by Islamic State. Fearing that this will boost the Kurdish rebellion across the border in southeast Turkey, it has threatened to “cleanse” them.

Turkey announced late on Tuesday that it was summoning Iraq’s ambassador to complain about the parliamentary vote.

“We believe this decision does not reflect the views of the majority of Iraqi people, whom Turkey has stood by for years and attempted to support with all its resources,” Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said.

“We find it noteworthy that the Iraqi parliament, which has not said anything about the accepted mandate for years, puts this on the agenda as though it were a new development in times when terror is taking so many lives in Turkey and Iraq.”

On Wednesday, Iraq summoned the Turkish ambassador to Baghdad to protest what it said were “provocative” comments from Ankara about the troop deployment.

(Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

Turkey removes two dozen elected mayors in Kurdish militant crackdown

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) – Turkey appointed new administrators in two dozen Kurdish-run municipalities on Sunday after removing their elected mayors over suspected links to militants, triggering pockets of protest in its volatile southeastern region bordering Syria and Iraq.

Police fired water cannon and tear gas to disperse demonstrators outside local government buildings in Suruc on the Syrian border as new administrators took over, security sources said. There were smaller protests elsewhere in the town.

There were also disturbances in the main regional city of Diyarbarkir and in Hakkari province near the Iraqi border, where police entered the municipality building and unfurled a large red Turkish flag, taking down the white local government flags that had previously flown.

President Tayyip Erdogan said this week the campaign against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants, who have waged a three-decade insurgency for Kurdish autonomy, was now Turkey’s largest ever. The removal of civil servants linked to them was a key part of the fight.

The 24 municipalities had been run by the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), the third largest in parliament, which denies direct links to the militants. It decried the move as an “administrative coup”.

“No democratic state can or will allow mayors and MPs to use municipality resources to finance terrorist organisations,” Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said on Twitter. “Being an elected official isn’t a licence to commit crimes.”

Turkey’s battle against the PKK resumed with a new intensity after a ceasefire collapsed last year and with attempts by Kurdish groups in Syria’s war to carve out an autonomous Kurdish enclave on Turkey’s border.

In a message to mark the Muslim Eid al Adha holiday, Erdogan said the PKK had been trying to step up attacks since a failed military coup in July and that they aimed to disrupt Turkish military operations in Syria.

The U.S. embassy said it was concerned by reports of clashes in the southeast and that while it supported Turkey’s right to combat terrorism, it was important to respect the right to peaceful protest.

“We hope that any appointment of trustees will be temporary and that local citizens will soon be permitted to choose new local officials in accordance with Turkish law,” it said.

WESTERN CONCERN

The crackdown comes as Ankara also pushes ahead with a purge of tens of thousands of supporters of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Turkey of orchestrating the attempted coup in July. Gulen denies any involvement.

The mayors of four other municipalities, three from the ruling AK Party and one from the nationalist MHP opposition, were also replaced over alleged links to what the authorities call the “Gulen Terror Organisation”, or FETO.

The interior ministry said the 28 mayors, 12 of whom are formally under arrest, were under investigation for providing “assistance and support” to the PKK and to Gulen’s organization.

Turkey has sacked or suspended more than 100,000 people since the failed coup. At least 40,000 people have been detained on suspicion of links to Gulen’s network.

The crackdown has raised concern from rights groups and Western allies who fear Erdogan is using the failed coup as pretext to curtail all dissent, and intensify his actions against suspected Kurdish militant sympathizers.

Turkish officials say the moves are justified by the extent of the threat to the state.

The HDP, which says it promotes a negotiated end to the PKK insurgency, said it did not recognize the legitimacy of the mayors’ removal.

“This illegal and arbitrary stance will result in the deepening of current problems in Kurdish cities, and the Kurdish issue becoming unresolvable,” it said in a statement.

Tensions in the southeast had already been heightened since Turkey launched a military incursion into Syria two and half weeks ago dubbed “Operation Euphrates Shield”.

The operation aims to push Islamic State fighters back from the border and prevent Kurdish militia fighters seizing ground in their wake. Turkey views the Kurdish militia as an extension of the PKK and fears that Kurdish gains there will fuel separatist sentiment on its own soil.

(Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk and Daren Butler in Istanbul, Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara; Writing by Nick Tattersall)

Mosul battle plans ready, could be concluded by year-end – Kurdish leader

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – Military plans to retake Mosul from Islamic State are ready and the northern Iraqi city might be recaptured before the end of the year, the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said on Friday.

The army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, backed by a U.S.-led coalition, will conduct the offensive but the role of pro-government militias has not been determined, Massoud Barzani said in an interview with France 24.

“There have been multiple meetings between leaders of the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army. They have finally agreed on the military plan and the role of each side,” Barzani said, without providing details.

Barzani said the timing for launching the push on Mosul, 360 km(240 miles) north of Baghdad, had not been determined, though Iraqi commanders have said it could begin as soon as late October.

Mosul, the largest city in Islamic State’s self-proclaimed caliphate, was taken by the jihadists in 2014 when Iraqi security forces dropped their weapons and fled.

Since then, peshmerga have entrenched in its eastern and northern outskirts while retrained Iraqi forces have advanced to Qayyara, 60 km south of the city, last month.

Mosul, a mosaic of diverse ethnic and sectarian communities, poses challenges to war-planners, including which forces will participate in the battle and how the city will be governed after.

Barzani said Shi’ite Muslim militias and a Sunni militia run by former Mosul governor Atheel al-Nujaifi, which have pledged to take part in the offensive, had not yet been given a role.

“Regarding the Hashid Shaabi or the Hashid Watani, there must be an understanding between these forces and the residents of the Mosul area. Until now that does not exist,” he said.

The Hashid Shaabi is an government umbrella for mostly Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias, and the Hashid Watani is made up mainly of former local police and volunteers from Mosul who have been trained by Turkey.

Asked if the city could be retaken by the end of 2016, Barzani said: “It is possible, but the post-liberation period must be prepared for.”

“It is very important for us to have certain guarantees that this tragedy will not be repeated in the future,” he said. “So we must agree with Baghdad and with the local people as well, how can we ensure that what happened will not be repeated?”

(Reporting by Saif Hameed; Editing by Angus MacSwan)

More than 70 tents burned down in Iraqi refugee camp

Tents that were destroyed by fire are seen at Yahayawa refugee camp near Kirkuk, Iraq,

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – More than 70 tents were destroyed by fire on Monday in the refugee camp of Yahayawa, near the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, but no one was injured, the United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR said.

The ministry of displacement and migration “has requested us to provide tents and core relief items CRIs to affected families”, UNHCR spokeswoman in Baghdad, Caroline Gluck, said.

“We will respond with tents and CRIs without delay; the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs is coordinating with other clusters to provide any other assistance needed,” she said in an email.

The war with Islamic State has forced about 3.4 million people to leave their homes across Iraq, the U.N. says.

Last week, the UNHCR said that hundreds of thousands more people could be uprooted by the military assault to dislodge the militants from Mosul, the biggest city still under Islamic State control, in northern Iraq.

The Yahayawa camp houses about 500 internally displaced families and is managed by the provincial council.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Louise Ireland)

In Iraq, Nigeria and now Turkey, child bombers strike

Iraqi security forces remove a suicide vest from a boy in Kirkuk, Iraq,

By Patrick Markey

ISTANBUL (Reuters) – The boy looked scared and younger than 16 when Iraqi police grabbed him on the street in the northern city of Kirkuk. Pulling off his shirt, they found a two-kilogram bomb strapped to his skinny frame.

That was last Sunday. Less than a day earlier, Turkey was less fortunate: a teenage bomber detonated his suicide vest among dancing guests at a Turkish wedding party, officials say, killing 51 people, nearly half of them children themselves.

Saturday’s attack at the wedding in Gaziantep marked not only Turkey’s deadliest this year, but also the first time in Turkey that militants may have deployed a child bomber in a way already used to deadly effect in wars from Africa to Syria.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban has long used children. One 14-year-old bomber on a bicycle hit the Kabul NATO base in 2012 killing six people; two years later a teenager blew himself up at French cultural center in the Afghan capital.

Researchers and officials say Islamic State and other militants are now increasingly using the same tactics, perhaps to build ranks depleted by losses, preserve adult fighters or simply catch security forces off guard.

In West Africa, Boko Haram has preyed on displaced children or young girls it kidnapped to force them to become bombers. In Iraq and Syria, activists say Islamic State took in children from towns it captures or recruited families to its territory, and indoctrinated their children in its schools and camps.

Islamic State in particular, highlights its child recruits for its “Cubs of the Caliphate” brigades, publishing images and videos on social media of children receiving training and indoctrination, and carrying out bombings or executions.

“Child recruitment across the region is increasing,” said Juliette Touma, a UNICEF regional spokesperson. “Children are taking a much more active role …, receiving training on the use of heavy weapons, manning checkpoints on the front lines, being used as snipers and in extreme cases being used as suicide bombers.”

Little has been publicly released about the attacker in the Gaziantep bombing. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday that the bomber was between 12 to 14 years old, and said Islamic State was probably responsible.

The blast tore into celebrations at a Kurdish wedding on the street late at night. As many as 22 of the dead were under the age of 14. No one claimed the attack, but Islamic State in the past has targeted Kurdish gatherings to stir ethnic tensions.

Turkey’s prime minister was more cautious on Monday, saying it was too early to say who carried out the attack, though security sources say witnesses reported the bomber was a child.

Turkish authorities are also investigating whether militants may have placed the explosives on the suspect, without his or her knowledge before detonating them long distance.

That tactic has been used before in Iraq, where children or even mentally disadvantaged adults have been dispatched as unwitting bomb couriers into markets and checkpoints before they are blown up from afar.

TEENAGE RECRUITS

In the failed attack in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk a day later, local television images and photographs showed the boy crying and screaming as he was grabbed by Iraqi security forces near an interior ministry building.

Security officials said the boy is 16 years old, though local media reports said he was much younger. He is an Iraqi national from Mosul, the largest urban center still under militant control, which Iraqi and Kurdish Peshmerga forces backed by U.S. air strikes are moving to liberate.

Hisham al-Hashimi, an analyst and author who advises the Iraqi government on Islamic State, says militants this year had reactivated their Heaven’s Youth Brigade, in reaction to the group’s battlefield losses in Iraq and Syria.

“Teenagers are easier to recruit for suicide missions, especially in moments of suffering or despair having lost loved ones,” he said. “They also attract less attention and less suspicion than male adults.”

Child recruits who have escaped from Islamic State ranks in its base in Syria’s Raqaa have described how they were taught to handle weapons, and also how to detonate suicide belts.

A study in February for Combating Terrorism Center at West Point military academy that examined Islamic State propaganda on child and youth ‘martyrs’ between January 2015 and 2016, found three times as many suicide operations involving children over the year.

“They represent an effective form of psychological warfare—to project strength, pierce defenses, and strike fear into enemy soldiers’ hearts,” the study said. “Islamic State is mobilizing children and youth at an alarming rate.”

Those tactics are mirrored in West Africa where U.N. officials have tracked a rise in attacks like the one carried out by a girl as young as ten who last year exploded a bomb in a busy market place in the Nigerian city of Maiduguri, killing 16 people.

Security sources at the time said the explosive device was wrapped around her body.

In an April report, UNICEF said attacks involving child suicide bombers between 2014 and this year rose four-fold in northeastern Nigeria, where militant group Boko Haram is based, and neighboring Cameroon, Niger and Chad.

A 12-year-old Nigerian girl captured with explosives in Cameroon in March told police she had been abducted by Boko Haram after the group overran her village a year earlier.

According to the UNICEF report, nearly two thirds of all the child attackers they tracked were girls. In the first six months of this year alone, UNICEF says it has also noted 38 child suicide bombers in West Africa.

“This is one of the defining features of this conflict,” said Thierry Delvigne-Jean of the agency’s west and central Africa office.

(Additional reporting by Maher Chmaytelli in Baghdad; Dasha Afanasieva and Orhan Coksun in Ankara; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

World’s largest cemetery grows bigger as Shi’ite militias bury their dead

he Wadi al-Salam cemetery, Arabic for "Peace Valley", is seen in Najaf, south of Baghdad, Iraq

By Alaa al-Marjani and Saif Hameed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – The world’s largest cemetery, in Iraq’s Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, is expanding at double its usual rate as the nation’s death rate increased with the war on Islamic State.

The Wadi al-Salam cemetery, Arabic for “Peace Valley,” has a special place in the hearts of Shi’ite Muslims as it surrounds the Mausoleum of their first imam, Ali Bin Abi Talib, a cousin and son-in-law of Prophet Mohammad.

The pace of daily burials rose to 150-200 after Islamic State, the ultra-hardline Sunni group overran a third of the country in 2014, said Jihad Abu Saybi, a historian of the cemetery. The rate was 80-120 a day previously, he said.

Shi’ite paramilitary often visit Ali’s golden-domed shrine before heading to the frontlines to battle Islamic State, and request to be laid to rest in Wadi al-Salam should they be killed, as a reward for their sacrifice.

As land becomes scarce, the cost of a standard 25 square meter family burial lot has risen to about 5 million Iraqi dinars ($4100) almost double the amount paid for the same lots before violence escalated as IS exerted control over large swathes of north and western Iraq in 2014.

Millions of graves of different shapes lie in the roughly 10 square km (4 square miles) cemetery that attracts burials from Shiites all over the world. By nationality, Iraq’s Iranian neighbors are thought to come second in number people interred near Ali’s golden-domed shrine.

Often built with baked bricks and plaster, decorated with Koranic calligraphy, some graves are above ground tombs, reflecting the wealth of those within.

(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)

Iraqi police remove suicide belt from 11-year-old

Iraqi security forces detain a boy after removing a suicide vest from him in Kirkuk

Iraqi police detained an 11-year-old boy near a Shi’ite mosque in Kirkuk city on Sunday (August 21) after removing a suicide vest from him.

Kurdish TV channel Kurdistan 24 showed footage of two policemen holding the shirtless boy, while a third officer stripped the explosive belt off his body.

Kiruk’s police chief Brigadier Khatab Omar said that the boy was carrying two kilograms of TNT explosive materials. He said the boy had entered the city five to six days ago.

The capture of the boy followed a deadly attack at a wedding party early on Sunday in the Turkish city of Gaziantep., which the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said was carried out by a child between the ages of 12 and 14.

Erdogan said Islamic State was the likely perpetrator of the attack.

Iraq’s Mosul residents feel relief, anxiety as liberation nears

Iraqi Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi (C) walks during his visit to the Nineveh Liberation Operations Command at Makhmour base, south of Mosul, Iraq,

By Ahmed Rasheed

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – As Iraqi forces prepare to attack Islamic State in its de facto capital of Mosul, residents inside the city and others who have managed to escape expressed relief at the prospect their home could be liberated from the extremist group’s harsh rule.

But they also warned that if the assault is successful, the city’s Sunni-majority population would refuse to return to what they called the repressive yoke imposed by the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad in the past.

The Iraqi army and its elite units that will lead the offensive are gradually taking up positions around the city 400 km (248 miles) north of Baghdad, from whose Grand Mosque in 2014 Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared a caliphate spanning regions of Iraq and Syria.

The offensive is slated for late September, said Hisham al-Hashimi, who works for the government as a consultant on IS affairs and is author of the book “The World of Daesh” (IS).

Eight Mosulite men, contacted secretly by phone on the outskirts of the city, said signs of dissent are increasing ahead of the expected assault. They all spoke on condition of not being identified for fear of retribution.

Walls have been daubed with the Arabic letter M, for “muqawama”, or resistance, or two parallel stripes, one red and one black, representing the Iraqi flag, said a resident who spoke from one of the rare areas that still gets mobile telephone coverage.

“These are acts of real bravery,” he said. “If you’re caught, you’re dead.”

The Iraqi national flag was raised twice in public squares, once in June and again in July, infuriating the militants who tore them down the next morning, residents told Reuters, authenticating videos posted on Facebook pages.

An unknown number of people were arrested after the July incident, among them former army officers, they said.

With a population at one time as large as two million, Mosul is the largest urban center under the ultra-hardline militants’ control. Its fall would mark their effective defeat in Iraq, according to Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.

Many IS leaders have fled Mosul for Syria with their families ahead of the planned offensive, Iraq’s defense minister Khaled al-Obeidi said on July 30.

As Iraqi forces tighten the noose, the militants have grown increasingly paranoid, residents said.

The militants have always kept tight control on communication to preempt hostile propaganda and prevent informants from passing on information to the Iraqi forces or the U.S.-led anti-IS military coalition that is carrying out most of the airstrikes on their positions.

They blocked mobile networks in 2014 and banned satellite TV earlier this year, allowing home internet access only through a server they controlled.

As of a month ago they restricted internet access further to a handful of official Wifi centers manned by supervisors who monitor content over users’ shoulders.

At checkpoints set up by the IS “amniya”, or security committee, people are asked if they have Facebook and must unlock their phones to prove that they do not.

“Thank God I don’t even know what Facebook is, but I was jailed for a week and paid a fine because they found dancing music saved on my mobile,” said a taxi driver reached by phone.

YOUNIS’S STORY

Younis, a high school teacher of Arabic literature in his 40’s, fled Mosul with his family in May. His biggest fear was that his son, just eight years old, was being indoctrinated into the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam.

“We escaped from Mosul and risked death for my son’s sake; I wanted to rescue him from turning into a jihadist,” he said, speaking in a flat in Baghdad, holding his boy in his arms.

“How can I stay silent and I’m seeing Daesh brainwashing my son and teaching him how to become a suicide bomber?” he said.

He showed a photocopy of the cover of a fifth grader’s textbook featuring a boy with an AK-47 machine gun on his shoulder.

“I know it’s risky to keep this paper with me but I decided to hide it and show it to anybody who asks me how life was under Daesh,” he added, puffing on a cigarette, which is banned by IS.

He expressed frustration that his wife has continued to wear the full veil, or niqab, after moving to Baghdad. The niqab is compulsory under the IS in Mosul, even on store mannequins, and women are forbidden to walk outside without a male guardian.

“Don’t cover your face please for God’s sake,” he pleaded with his wife. “No need to be afraid anymore, you’re a human being and not a slave.”

Younis said he paid a taxi driver $5,000 to help them flee Mosul via the Kurdish Peshmerga lines east of the city, taking advantage of the confusion that ensued after advances made by the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in May.

The army progressed further in July, capturing the Qayyara airfield 60 km (35 miles) south of Mosul, which will serve as the main staging post for the expected offensive.

Once the fighting intensifies, up to one million people could be driven from their homes in northern Iraq, “posing a massive humanitarian problem for the country”, the International Committee of the Red Cross said last month.

More than 3.4 million people have already been forced by conflict to leave their homes across Iraq, taking refuge in areas under control of the government or in the Kurdish region.

IRAQI ARMY SUCCESSES

The Peshmerga fighters have been deployed to the north and east of Mosul with their back to their Kurdish region that hosts a base of U.S.-led coalition troops assisting Iraqi forces. Local Sunni fighters will also join the offensive.

The possible participation of Iranian-backed Shi’ite militias is stirring controversy, however.

Mosul residents and politicians said they dread the participation of these militias, known as Popular Mobilization, or Hashid Shaabi in Arabic.

They cite abuses in Sunni cities retaken from Islamic State, like the looting in Tikrit last year and reports of torture, revenge killings and kidnappings in Falluja, a historic jihadist stronghold near Baghdad.

Although Sunnis are predominant in the northern and western provinces under militant control, Shi’ites are in the majority overall in Iraq.

The Sunnis in Mosul were mostly indifferent to the IS offensive of 2014 and some even supported it if it would end the oppression of the security forces under former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, an ally of Iran.

Maliki has since been succeeded by Abadi, another Shi’ite, who has taken a conciliatory approach toward the Sunnis and softened the alliance with Tehran.

Abadi has yet to decide whether the Shi’ite militias will take part in the offensive.

The former governor of Mosul, Atheel al-Nujaifi, a Sunni, told Reuters the local administration of the city should have more autonomy after the militants are dislodged.

A police force reflective of the city’s complex ethnic and religious make-up should be in charge of security, not the army, added Nujaifi, who leads a Sunni militia that plans to take part in the offensive on Mosul alongside the army.

“The sweeping advance of Daesh in Mosul created a new reality,” he said.

Younis, the teacher, and Mosulites who still live in the city said even though IS rule was much worse than government rule under Maliki, the population won’t accept to return to the previous situation.

“Berlin after Hitler couldn’t possibly be like before and so should Mosul be after Daesh,” said Younis. “We need a new system to govern Mosul, we cannot suffer more ordeals.”

(Writing by Maher Chmaytelli; Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

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