Tag Archives: War

Yemen orphanage braves nearby air strikes

Boys play football in the yard of The al-Shawkani Foundation for Orphans Care in Sanaa, Yemen, January 24, 2017. REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

By Khaled Abdullah

SANAA (Reuters) – After two years of war, orphans in the Yemeni capital Sanaa have only one dream – to survive.

The al-Shawkani Foundation for Orphan Care is located around 100 meters (yards) from the al-Nahdain mountain, widely believed to be an arms depot that has been repeatedly bombarded by Saudi-led coalition’s fighter jets.

Bombardment of the explosive-laden peak send huge mushroom clouds erupting into Sanaa’s skies and shake the whole city.

As the war rages on, the orphans suffer through a constant state of fear and trauma.

“We were scared, and every time we hear the plane’s noise, they (orphanage staff) would rush us quickly to the basement fearing for our safety,” said Mousa Saleh Munassar, 14.

“Many of my friends have left the orphanage and returned to their relatives,” he added. “I expect strikes nearby at any time.”

Mousa once dreamt of becoming a doctor, but describes the only dream he and his friends now share: “We want the war to calm down for us to see security and stability come back.”

Orphanage director Muhammad al-Qadhi says it relies on the generosity of private donors and charity groups.

But the war has devastated the economy and unleashed a humanitarian crisis, depleting savings and public resources.

“We are going through a pressing need for aid for these orphans amid the scarcity of resources that used to provide for them due to the ongoing war,” he said.

The foundation used to host around 350 orphans before the conflict began. Now only around one-third remain after most left for the relative safety of living with family members in the countryside.

Yemen’s conflict pits the Iran-allied Houthi movement and elements of the military against the Saudi-backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Saudi-led air strikes have repeatedly hit hospitals, homes and markets, but the kingdom denies targeting civilians.

Largely stalemated in nationwide battlefronts, the war has plunged millions into poverty, displaced millions of others and killed more than 10,000 people.

Children have born the brunt of the country’s collapse.

According to UNICEF, one child dies in Yemen every ten minutes from preventable diseases including malnutrition, respiratory infections and diarrhea.

Nine-year-old Abdulaziz Badr al-Faisari of the orphanage said he and his fellow orphans were terrified when bombs shake the whole building, but appeared resigned to his fate.

“We have had nowhere to flee.”

(Editing by Tom Heneghan)

Syrian rebels launch second Damascus attack in three days

A view shows an empty street near the Abbasiyin area in the east of the capital Damascus, in this handout picture provided by SANA on March 20, 2017, Syria. SANA/Handout via REUTERS

AMMAN/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian rebels stormed a government-held area in northeastern Damascus on Tuesday for the second time in three days, sources on both sides said, pressing the boldest assault on the capital by opposition fighters in several years.

The spokesman for one of the main insurgent groups involved in the attack told Reuters the new offensive began at 5.00 a.m., targeting an area rebel fighters had seized from government control on Sunday before being forced to retreat.

A Syrian military source told Reuters rebel fighters had entered the area, setting off a car bomb at the start of the attack. The source said a group of rebels that had entered the area had been encircled and were “being dealt with”.

The rebel groups have launched the assault from their Eastern Ghouta stronghold to the east of the capital. Government forces have escalated military operations against Eastern Ghouta in recent weeks, seeking to tighten a siege on the area. The rebel assault aims partly to relieve that pressure.

The fighting has focused around the Abassiyin area of the northeastern Jobar district, some 2 km east of the Old City walls, at a major road junction leading into the capital.

A witness near the area heard explosions from around 5.00 a.m., followed by clashes and the sound of warplanes overhead.

Wael Alwan, the spokesman of rebel group Failaq al Rahman, told Reuters: “We launched the new offensive and we restored all the points we withdrew from on Monday. We have fire control over the Abassiyin garages and began storming it.”

The Syrian military source said: “They entered a narrow pocket – the same area of the (previous) breach – and now this group is being dealt with.”

BOMBARDMENT

The government says the attack is being carried out by fighters of the Nusra Front, a jihadist group that was al Qaeda’s official affiliate in the Syrian war until it declared they had broken off ties last year. The Nusra Front is now part of an Islamist alliance called Tahrir al-Sham.

The intensity of the Syrian army’s counterattack had forced the rebels to retreat from most of the areas they captured in the first attack.

The rebels have lost ground in the nearby areas of Qaboun and Barza.

A rebel commander said the Syrian army was intensifying its shelling on areas they had advanced in Jobar and towns across Eastern Ghouta.

“The bombardment is on all fronts … there is no place that has not been hit … the regime has burnt the area by planes and missiles,” said Abu Abdo a field commander from Failaq al Rahman brigade.

The Syrian government appears to be employing the same strategy it has used to force effective surrender deals on rebels elsewhere around the capital through escalated bombardment and siege tactics.

Rebel fighters have been granted safe passage to insurgent-held areas of northern Syria under such agreements.

The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said at least 143 air raids were conducted by the Syrian army on rebel held eastern parts of Damascus, mostly targeting Jobar, since the rebels launched their offensive.

President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian army, along with allied Russian, Iranian and Shi’ite militia forces, have the upper hand in the war for western Syria, with a steady succession of military victories over the past 18 months.

For rebels, however, their first such large scale foray in over four years inside the capital has shown they are still able to wage offensive actions despite their string of defeats.

(Reporting by Suleiman al-Khalidi in Amman, Tom Perry in Beirut; Writing by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Tom Perry and Alison Williams)

Iraqi forces try to bring civilians out of east Mosul, U.S. pledges more support

A wounded displaced Iraqi girl and her family who had fled their homes wait to enter Hammam al-Alil camp south of Mosul, Iraq March 21, 2017. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Patrick Markey

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi government forces attempted to evacuate civilians from Mosul’s Islamic State-held Old City on Tuesday so that troops could clear the area, but militant snipers hampered the effort, Iraqi officers said.

They said the insurgents were also using civilians as human shields as government units edged toward the al-Nuri Mosque, the focus of recent fighting in the five-month-long campaign to crush Islamic State in the city that was once the de facto capital of their self-proclaimed Islamic caliphate.

As many as 600,000 civilians remain in the western sector of Mosul, complicating a battle being fought with artillery and air strikes as well as ground combat. Thousands have escaped in recent days.

“Our forces control around 60 percent of the west now,” Defence Ministry spokesman Brigadier General Yahya Rasool told a news conference in eastern Mosul. “It’s the Old City now with small streets and it’s a hard fight with civilians inside. We are trying to evacuate them.

“We are a few hundred meters from the mosque now, we are advancing on al-Nuri. We know it means a lot to Daesh,” he said, using an Arab acronym for Islamic State.

The capture of the mosque would be a huge symbolic prize as well as strategic gain for the government as it was there where Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al—Baghdadi declared the caliphate in July 2014 after the militants had captured large areas of Iraq and Syria.

Government forces backed by a U.S.-led international coalition retook several cities last year, liberated eastern Mosul in December, and are now closing in on the west, but the militants are putting up fierce resistance from the close-packed houses and narrow streets.

Baghdadi and other leaders have fled the city for the hinterlands, where Islamic State remnants may regroup and wage a new phase of insurgency. At the same time, IS forces in the Syrian city of Raqqa are under attack in a parallel conflict.

Brigadier General Saad Maan said soldiers had killed nine IS snipers on Tuesday and destroyed a bomb factory.

“There are lots of snipers on top of the buildings in the Old City around the al-Nuri Mosque. We need to evacuate the families from inside as they using them as a shield when we are advancing on the mosque,” he told the news conference.

No precise toll of civilian casualties has been given but a prominent Iraqi politician said last week that the number could be as high as 3,500 dead since the attack on western Mosul started in mid-February.

An emergency field hospital set up by the U.S. medical charity Samaritan’s Purse says it has treated more than 1,000 patients, many of them women and children, since January. They suffered wounds from gunfire, land mines, mortar rounds, car bombings and booby-traps.

Reporters at the frontline on Tuesday said clashes took place around the railway station in some areas troops had held a few days earlier. Troops fired rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-guns at militants around the station as families ran across streets to avoid snipers

“We sitting inside our house and bullets were coming through our door” said one woman fleeing to government lines.

U.S. SUPPORT TO INCREASE

Saad Maan also said the bodies of a colonel and two other officers who had gone missing during the battle had been found. The colonel had been shot. But he said the men had not been captured by the insurgents.

An Interior Ministry official told Reuters on Monday that the insurgents had captured a police colonel and eight other officers after they ran out of ammunition during a skirmish. But a Rapid Response units spokesman denied this when asked for comment on Monday night.

The issue is sensitive as Islamic State have a record of torturing, mutilating and killing military and civilian captives, and such an incident could be a blow to troops’ morale.

The number of displaced people from both sides of Mosul since the start of the offensive has reached 355,000, according to government figures. Some 181,000 had poured out of western Mosul since the start of the operations to retake that side.

In Washington, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said he had won assurances of greater U.S. support in the war in talks on Monday with U.S. President Donald Trump. But Abadi cautioned that military might alone would not be sufficient.

He told a forum in Washington after his meeting with Trump that he had been told U.S. “support will not only continue but will accelerate.”

“But of course we have to be careful here,” he said. “We are not talking about military confrontation as such. Committing troops is one thing, while fighting terrorism is another thing.”

Abadi, who leads the Shi’ite majority government in Baghdad, said it would be crucial to win over the local population in Sunni-dominated Mosul to achieve lasting peace.

He is in Washington this week ahead of a gathering of world leaders of the coalition fighting Islamic State, who as well as waging war in Iraq and Syria have inspired attacks on civilian targets in Europe, Africa and elsewhere that have killed hundreds of people.

Click http://tmsnrt.rs/2mZWV4j for graphic on Battle for Mosul

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad, Writing by Angus MacSwan in Erbil; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Syrian rebels, civilians begin leaving Homs district in deal with government

Syrian army soldiers (back L) and Russian soldiers (back R) monitor as rebel fighters and their families evacuate the besieged Waer district in the central Syrian city of Homs, after an agreement was reached between rebels and Syria's army, March 18, 2017. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

By Ellen Francis

HOMS, Syria/BEIRUT (Reuters) – Rebels and their families began leaving their last bastion in the Syrian city of Homs on Saturday, state media and a Reuters witness said, under a Russian-backed deal with the government expected to be among the largest evacuations of its kind.

The agreement underlines Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s upper hand in the war, as more rebel fighters opt to leave areas they have defended for years in deals that amount to negotiated withdrawals to other parts of the country.

Several buses drove out of the al-Waer district in Homs, which was an early center of the popular uprising against Assad.

Between 10,000 and 15,000 rebels and civilians would evacuate in batches over the coming weeks under the deal, according to opposition activists in al-Waer and a war monitor.

Homs governor Talal Barazi told Reuters that he expected 1,500 people, including at least 400 fighters, to depart on Saturday for rebel-held areas northeast of Aleppo, and that most of al-Waer’s residents would stay.

“The preparations and the reality on the ground indicate that things will go well,” Barazi said.

The Syrian government has described such deals as a “workable model” that brings the country closer to peace after six years of conflict. But the opposition decries them as a tactic of forcibly displacing people who oppose Assad after years of bombardment and siege.

Along with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC), Russian and Syrian forces were overseeing the evacuation, which would take about six weeks, Barazi said.

FULL EXIT

He said there was communication with other rebel-held areas north of Homs city to reach similar deals, including the towns of al-Rastan and Talbiseh.

“We are optimistic that the full exit of armed (fighters) from this district will pave the way for other reconciliations and settlements,” he said.

The government has increasingly tried to press besieged rebel areas to surrender and accept what it calls reconciliation agreements.

In an interview with Chinese TV station Phoenix last week, Assad said deals brokered locally with rebels were “the real political solutions”. He added that he had not expected anything from Geneva, where U.N.-led peace talks ended this month with no breakthrough.

Broadcasting live from the al-Waer departure area, Syrian state television spoke to a Russian colonel, who said via an interpreter that security would soon return to the district.

“This agreement was reached only under the patronage of the Russian side … and it will be implemented with Russian guarantees,” he said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, said the buses would go to the Jarablus area held by Turkey-backed rebels in the northern Aleppo countryside.

Once completed, it would mark the biggest evacuation during the war out of one Syrian district, which is home to about 40,000 civilians and more than 2,500 fighters, the monitoring group said.

“It’s because there is zero trust in Assad’s government. That’s why the numbers are high,” said the head of the Homs Media Center, run by opposition activists. “For years, it has besieged us…and bombed people’s homes.”

Many did not want to stay out of fear of arrest, and around 15,000 people had signed up to evacuate so far, he said.

“People are going to live in tents, in refugee camps,” the activist said, adding that he also planned to leave in the coming weeks. “They are willing to leave their homes, their land, towards the unknown.”

ON THE BACK FOOT

Dozens of buses stood at a crossing in the morning waiting to leave al-Waer, accompanied by SARC ambulances, a Reuters witness said.

Police officers searched people before the buses drove out, the Homs police chief told Syrian state television.

In the coming weeks, evacuees could be shuttled to other rebel-held areas in northern Syria, including the insurgent stronghold of Idlib province, state TV said.

Under the agreement, fighters could stay in al-Waer if they hand over their weapons and settle their affairs with the government, it said.

State-owned al-Ikhbariya TV cited the Homs governor as saying that 20 buses had left so far and that rebels carried their small arms out with them.

The government would start returning its services to the district with the departure of the last batch of rebels, Barazi said. Allegations of an evacuation of al-Waer’s residents were “devoid of truth”, the channel quoted Barazi as saying.

The deal follows others that were never fully implemented between the government and rebel groups in al-Waer, which has been pounded by air strikes in recent weeks.

A few hundred rebels from the district have previously been allowed safe passage to Idlib in the northwest.

Rebels and civilians have poured into Idlib at an accelerating rate over the last year, bussed out of other parts of western Syria that the government and allied forces recaptured from rebels.

Rebel groups have been on the back foot in Syria, following Russia’s intervention into the war on Assad’s side, bringing its air power to bear in support of his army and its Iranian and Shi’ite militia allies.

The wide array of mostly Sunni rebel factions includes some jihadists as well as some groups supported by the United States, Turkey and Gulf monarchies.

(Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut; Additional reporting by Marwan Makdisi in Homs; Editing by Dale Hudson and Stephen Powell)

South Sudan government to blame for famine, still buying arms: U.N. report

Women and children wait to be registered prior to a food distribution carried out by the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) in Thonyor, Leer state, South Sudan, February 26, 2017. REUTERS/Siegfried Modola

By Michelle Nichols

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – South Sudan’s government is mainly to blame for famine in parts of the war-torn country, yet President Salva Kiir is still boosting his forces using millions of dollars from oil sales, according to a confidential United Nations report.

U.N. sanctions monitors said 97 percent of South Sudan’s known revenue comes from oil sales, a significant portion of which is now forward oil sales, and that at least half of the budget – “likely substantially more” – is devoted to security.

“Revenue from forward oil sales totaled approximately $243 million between late March and late October 2016,” the panel of U.N. monitors said in the report to the U.N. Security Council, seen by Reuters on Thursday.

“Despite the scale and scope of the political, humanitarian, and economic crises, the panel continues to uncover evidence of the ongoing procurement of weapons by the … Government for the SPLA (South Sudanese army), the National Security Service, and other associated forces and militias,” the report said.

The United Nations has declared a famine in some parts of the world’s youngest country, where nearly half its population – some 5.5 million people – face food shortages. A civil war erupted in 2013 when Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, fired his deputy Riek Machar, a Nuer, who has fled and is now in South Africa.

“The bulk of evidence suggests that the famine … has resulted from protracted conflict and, in particular, the cumulative toll of military operations undertaken by the SPLM/A in Government in southern Unity state; denial of humanitarian access, primarily by the SPLM/A in Government; and population displacement resulting from the war,” the report said.

The United Nations says at least one quarter of South Sudanese have been displaced since 2013.

‘NOT CORRECT’

South Sudan’s government rejected the report on Friday.

“We have not bought arms for the last of two to three years,” government spokesman Michael Makuei Lueth told reporters after a cabinet meeting.

“We have rights to buy arms for self-protection or self-defense … So this idea of the U.N. saying the government of South Sudan doesn’t care about its people and they are fan of buying arms all the time is not correct,” he said.

The annual report of the sanctions monitors to the 15-member Security Council comes ahead of a ministerial meeting of the body on South Sudan next Thursday, which is due to be chaired by British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson.

While the previous U.S. administration of President Barack Obama was heavily involved in the birth of South Sudan, which gained independence from Sudan in 2011, and led Security Council efforts to try to end the civil war, the policy of new U.S. President Donald Trump toward the African state is unclear.

In December, the Security Council failed to adopt a U.S.-drafted resolution to impose an arms embargo and further sanctions on South Sudan despite warnings by U.N. officials of a possible genocide. The U.N. monitors again recommended in their report that the council impose an arms embargo on South Sudan.

The Security Council set up a targeted sanctions regime for South Sudan in March 2015 and has blacklisted six generals – three from each side of the conflict – by subjecting them to an asset freeze and travel ban.

The U.N. monitors said all parties to the conflict continue to commit widespread human rights violations “with near complete impunity and a lack of any credible effort to prevent these violations or to punish the perpetrators.”

U.N. peacekeepers have been in South Sudan since 2011.

(Additional reporting by Denis Dumo in Juba; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Need to avoid civilian deaths weighs on minds of U.S. forces in Mosul battle

Displaced Iraqis flee their homes as Iraqi forces battle with Islamic State militants, in western Mosul, Iraq March 18, 2017. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem

By Angus MacSwan

QAYYARA WEST AIRFIELD, Iraq (Reuters) – As the battle for Mosul moves to the narrow streets and densely packed houses of the Old City, U.S. artillery gunners and helicopter pilots supporting Iraqi forces face an age-old problem – how to avoid killing civilians.

They place their faith in precision missiles which can hit their target with great accuracy. But human instinct also comes into play against an Islamic State enemy which has used civilians as human shields and hides in houses and mosques.

“Our mission is to find and destroy ISIS. We are not here to kill the wrong people,” said Captain Lucas Gebhart, commander of the 4/6th Cavalry’s Bravo Troop of Apache attack helicopters.

The troop is based at this airfield about 60 kms south of Mosul, as is a rocket battery which fires into west Mosul.

A major site at the height of the U.S. occupation, Islamic State captured Qayyara from Iraqi government forces in 2014 and destroyed it. The Iraqis retook it in July last year, and now the U.S. Army is building it up again as a support base for the Mosul operation.

Gebhart, who wore a U.S. Cavalry hat with a crossed-sabre insignia along with his regular uniform, has been here since December. The troop flies close support for the Iraqi army and escorts medical evacuations. It has had more than 200 engagements with Islamic State fighters in that time, he said.

“We fly every day, weather permitting. We are firing missiles most of the time,” Gebhart told reporters.

The Iraqi army started its offensive on Mosul, Islamic State’s last stronghold in Iraq, in October and retook the east side of the city, bisected by the Tigris river, in January. The west, including the Old City, is much harder going.

“The west side is very congested and it will present new challenges for us. We realize the need to be careful as we go forward,” Gebhart said.

One of those challenges is avoiding civilian casualties in a conflict where fighters are mixed in among the population and sometimes hiding behind them.

“Everyone that flies with me are fathers and husbands, so we are very deliberate to avoid casualties we don’t want. We use guided missiles. The things we shoot from an Apache, they go where we want them to go,” Gebhart said.

Targets are identified and approved by the Iraqi army. But circumstances can change in a moment.

“I have personal experience of human shields. I engaged a target and they pulled a family of women and children out of a house. The missile was already in the air but I was able to move it,” he said.

“You’ve got a little bit of time. If something happens post-missile release, we have procedures to move it.”

Gebhart, aged 32, joined the military as a teenager after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. He served in the 82nd Airborne in Iraq in 2003 before going to West Point and becoming a cavalry officer. He also served two tours of duty in Afghanistan.

“I love my job. I don’t lose sleep over it,” he said.

WE LOVE TO FIRE

In another section of the base, the 18th Field Artillery “Odin” battery operates a High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), fired off the back of trucks.

On Friday afternoon, the battery fired 10 rockets, each worth about $100,000, in the space of about 20 minutes. They headed skywards in a cloud of white smoke and a flash of fire as a Bob Marley song played from a platoon tent. They would reach their target in east Mosul in about a minute.

Lieutenant Mary Floyd explained that the rockets were GPS-guided. All fire missions were approved by senior officers at the Combined Joint Operations Center and the coordinates were sent to the battery through computers.

“The rockets go really high so we have to clear airspace -– civilian and military -– along the flight path. We have had to end missions because they saw aviation,” she said.

Although rockets are often aimed at targets in built-up, populated areas, the battery was confident they would hit what they intended. If the rockets are off target, they do not detonate, she said.

“They have very, very low collateral damage, so we like to use them a lot,” Floyd said, using the military term for civilian casualties. “When the rockets hit they land at near a vertical angle. That really confines the blast to one house.”

The battery has fired hundreds of rockets since deploying to Qayyara, she said.

“The tempo changes. We’ll go a couple of days without orders. Then we might be firing all night.”

The issue of civilian casualties has dogged the U.S. military during its long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from shootings at check-points to drone bombings. In the battle for Mosul, Iraqi and U.S.-led coalition war planes have also been pounding parts of the city.

Figures of such casualties are hard to come by. Washington has stressed its forces take every effort to avoid them.

On Tuesday, a prominent Iraqi politician and businessman, Khamis Khanjar, said at least 3,500 civilians have been killed in west Mosul since the offensive closed in on it.

The U.S.-led coalition said in a statement that up to March 4, it had assessed that “more likely than not”, at least 220 civilians had been unintentionally killed by coalition strikes since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve.

While the men and women of Odin battery were fully aware of the risk, they believe in their work.

“We love to fire. It makes me very happy,” Floyd said. “At night it is very beautiful.”

(Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Iraqi troops seize main bridge, advance on mosque in battle for Mosul

Members of the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) sit in a military vehicle during a battle between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants, in the city of Mosul, Iraq March 15, 2017. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

By Patrick Markey and John Davison

MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) – Iraqi government forces battling Islamic State for Mosul took control of a main bridge over the Tigris river on Wednesday and advanced towards the mosque where the group’s leader declared a caliphate in 2014, federal police said.

The seizure of the Iron Bridge, linking eastern Mosul with the militant-held Old City on the west side, means the government holds three of the five bridges over the Tigris and bolsters Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s assertion that the battle is reaching its final stages.

The bridge, which was damaged in fighting late last year, was captured by federal police and Interior Ministry Rapid Response units, a police statement said.

The gains were made in heavy fighting in which troops fought street-by-street against an enemy using suicide car bombs, mortar and sniper fire, and grenade-dropping drones to defend what was once their main stronghold.

“Our troops are making a steady advance … and we are now less than 800 meters from the mosque,” a federal police spokesman said.

Losing the city would be a huge blow to Islamic State as it has served as the group’s de facto capital since its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself head of a caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria from the Nuri Mosque in July 2014.

The capture of the mosque would thus be a huge symbolic victory as well as a concrete gain. But many hard days of fighting could still lie ahead as government forces try to make headway in the streets and narrow alleyways of the Old City.

Islamic State fighters have booby-trapped houses, and government forces will also be fighting amongst civilians, ruling out the extensive use of air and artillery support.

Heavy fighting was also reported on Wednesday around the Mosul museum by journalists and combatants. An Islamic State suicide car bomb exploded near the museum. Helicopters strafed the ground with machinegun fire and missiles.

DECISIVE STAGE

The intense combat marked a decisive stage in the battle for Mosul which started on Oct. 17 last year, and in the wider struggle against Islamic State.

In neighboring Syria, three separate forces are advancing on the city of Raqqa, the main Syrian city under Islamic State control.

As well as waging jihad in Iraq and Syria, the militants have inspired attacks in cities in Europe, Africa and elsewhere that have killed hundreds of civilians.

In Baghdad, Abadi said: “Daesh (Islamic State) become day after day surrounded inside a tight area and they are in their final days.”

In a news conference on Tuesday night, he warned the insurgents that they must surrender or face death.

“We will preserve families of Daesh who are civilians but we will punish the terrorists and bring them to justice if they surrender,” he said. “They are cornered and if they will not surrender. They will definitely get killed.”Iraqi officers said cloudy weather hampered air cover on Wednesday morning. Police commander Younes Jabouri said troops were moving forward but it was not easy because of the weather.

“We’re on the edge of the Old City. There are lots of shops, garages and markets and a lot of residents and small streets and alleyways. It takes time because there are a lot of civilians and Daesh uses them as human shields, they don’t let them leave,” he said.

Residents have streamed out of western neighborhoods recaptured by the government, many desperately hungry and traumatized by living under Islamic State’s harsh rule.

Haider Ibrahim Rohawi, a market trader, was fleeing Lagedat district with his family, pushing his possessions in a handcart.

“Yesterday afternoon the army came. Just a day before Daesh were in our houses with us. There was a lot of fighting. They shot one of the Daesh right in front of me. Everyone is threatened by Daesh, that’s why we leave. The area is freed. We have no power, no fuel, nothing.”

As many as 600,000 civilians are still trapped with the militants inside Mosul. The Ministry of Immigration and Displacement said on Tuesday that in recent days, almost 13,000 displaced people from western Mosul had been given assistance and temporary accommodation each day, adding to the 200,000 already displaced.

Staff Brigadier Falah al-Obeidi of the Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) told Reuters his troops on Wednesday took control over the Dor al-Sikak and al-Nafut areas, site of the militants’ main weapons stores in Mosul just west of the Old City.

“Yesterday resistance was very strong in that area. It’s where their stores are, and the people living there, both men and women, are with them (supporters or members),” he said.

Aerial surveillance photos showed women carrying guns, Obeidi said.

CTS troops also brought in a Russian-made missile and two warheads. They had found 40 more such missiles stored in homes in Dor al-Sikak.

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad; Writing by Angus MacSwan in Erbil; Editing by Louise Ireland and Dominic Evans)

Syria’s unaccompanied children biggest victims of war: UNICEF

Geert Cappelaere, Unicef regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Beirut, Lebanon March 15, 2017. REUTERS/Jamal Saidi

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Children have suffered the most in Syria’s six-year war, and among them the most vulnerable are those separated from their families, a senior Unicef official told Reuters on Wednesday.

Furthemore, as well as the large number of direct casualties from warfare, many more children have died or suffered from indirect consequences of the crisis including a collapse in healthcare.

“For unaccompanied and separated children the situation is even harsher than for other children, and for children in general it’s already a very, very difficult situation,” said Geert Cappelaere, Unicef regional director for the Middle East and North Africa.

Unicef, the United Nation’s agency focusing on children, issued a report on Monday on the war in Syria, which began after protests six years ago against President Bashar al-Assad.

In its report, Unicef said it had documented the deaths of 652 children last year, 20 percent more than in 2015. But Cappelaere said that represented only a small proportion of the real number of deaths.

“In 2016 every six hours a child dying or severely injured in Syria … dramatic figures. But these are only the figures we have been able to verify. We do assume that indeed the number of child casualties is really much higher,” he said.

Documenting the real impact of the war is “an impossible task,” he added.

Cappelaere returned on Tuesday from a three-day visit to Damascus, Homs and Aleppo, a city that suffered massive destruction in siege-and-bombardment fighting that culminated late last year when the army overran a last rebel-held pocket.

He was speaking to Reuters in an interview in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, where more than a million Syrians have sought refuge from the war, including many who now live in informal, makeshift camps with few services.

Cappelaere said that in the Jibreen shelter for displaced people in Aleppo on Tuesday, each of the three newly arrived families he spoke to was carrying a child separated from its family – a measure of the extent of the problem.

“Many of these children are also undocumented. They don’t have their paper…. The problem is not only for tracing (their families), but also for registering in the shelter, the problem of registering them in the schools,” he said.

Even more than other children in Syria’s war, those separated from their families are vulnerable to exploitation.

Already about three-quarters of children in Syria are working and there is what Cappelaere called a “very rapid” rise in the number of early marriages, particularly among girls, because families cannot afford to feed and look after them.

However, there are still signs of hope amid the devastation, Cappelaere said.

“We were driving out of Aleppo yesterday – 15 minutes of driving in the midst of rubble – and suddenly we see two, three, four children with their backpacks on the way to school,” he said.

(Reporting by Angus McDowall; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

Dozens killed in double suicide attack in Syrian capital

Security personnel stand near a damaged entrance after a suicide blast at the Palace of Justice in Damascus, Syria March 15, 2017. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Two suicide bomb attacks killed at least 31 people and wounded dozens more in Damascus on Wednesday, state media reported, in the second such spate of bombings in the Syrian capital in five days.

The first suicide bomber targeted the Palace of Justice, the main courthouse in central Damascus near the Old City. Justice Minister Najem al-Ahmad told reporters the initial death toll was 31, mostly civilians.

The second suicide blast struck a restaurant in the al-Rabweh area of Damascus to the west of the first attack causing several casualties, state media reported.

The courthouse bomber set off his explosive device at 1:20 p.m. (1120 GMT) as the police tried to search him and stop him from entering the building, state television cited the Damascus police chief as saying.

Syrian state television broadcast footage from inside the courthouse showing blood splattered on a floor littered with papers, a shoe and broken tiles and stones. Images from a hospital showed a man in a suit on a stretcher with blood on his clothes.

The explosion hit the courthouse “at a time when the area is crowded” with lawyers, judges and civilians, harming a large number of people, Ahmed al-Sayyid, a senior state legal official told state-run al-Ikhbariya TV.

He later added that 45 people had been wounded. No further details were immediately available.

“RETALIATION”

“The attack came as a retaliation against the latest victories of the Syrian army and the political victories in Geneva and Astana,” Ahmad said, referring to recent peace talks in Switzerland and Kazakhstan.

State media reported that the second bomber had entered the restaurant and detonated the device after having been chased by security forces.

On Saturday scores of people, most of them Iraqi Shi’ite pilgrims, were killed in a double suicide attack in Damascus claimed by an alliance of jihadist groups known as Tahrir al-Sham.

In late February an attack in central Homs killed dozens of people with coordinated shootings and suicide bombs that targeted two security headquarters and led to the death of a senior official.

That attack was also claimed by Tahrir al-Sham, which includes the Fateh al-Sham group that was formerly known as the Nusra Front until it formally broke ties with al Qaeda last year.

(Reporting by Ellen Francis in Beirut and Kinda Makieh in Damascus; Writing by Tom Perry and Angus McDowall; Editing by Ken Ferris and Gareth Jones)

Ukraine halts all cargo traffic with rebel-held territory

FILE PHOTO: Activists walk along carriages loaded with coal from the occupied territories which they blocked at Kryvyi Torets station in the village of Shcherbivka in Donetsk region, Ukraine, February 14, 2017. REUTERS/Konstantin Chernichkin/File Photo

By Pavel Polityuk and Alexei Kalmykov

KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian authorities on Wednesday halted all cargo traffic with rebel-held territory in the east of the country, formalizing an existing rail blockade by Ukrainian activists that has fueled the worst political crisis in nearly a year.

In a standoff that is hurting the economies of both sides, separatists have seized control of some Ukrainian businesses in their territory after having their coal and steel shipments halted in the rail blockade.

Tensions have escalated in recent days, leading to clashes between law enforcement agencies and the activists, who have been joined by some members of parliament.

The blockade posed a dilemma for President Petro Poroshenko: breaking it up by force could provoke a major domestic backlash, but allowing it to proceed unilaterally risked undermining the state’s authority.

Poroshenko’s Security and Defense Council introduced the state-led cargo ban to counter what he described as the political and social threat posed by the unofficial blockade.

The decision “is dictated by the necessity to prevent the destabilizing of the situation in the country, which is being undermined by political operators,” he told the council.

“Our wish is to prevent social strife,” he said.

The suspension will remain until rebels hand back control of a number of Ukraine-registered businesses and comply with a 2015 peace agreement, according to the Security Council.

The asset seizures have mostly affected businesses in the financial and industrial group owned by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.

On Wednesday, Akhmetov’s DTEK Energy said its main mining assets in rebel-held territory, already idling because of the blockade, had been taken under separatist control. On the international debt market, its 2024 dollar bond fell 1.6 cents to a two-week low on the news.

The crisis has put pressure on Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman’s government just as it is about to lose its year-long immunity from facing any vote of no confidence. It was appointed last April by a fragile coalition that includes Poroshenko’s party, after the previous government fell.

Rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko said Ukraine’s decision had nothing to do with the separatists, saying it was instead “evidence of an internal power struggle in Kiev.”

The suspension will further squeeze the Ukrainian economy, already facing potential rolling blackouts and monthly economic losses of up to 4 billion hryvnias ($150 million) from the existing blockade, according to the government.

The central bank says expected economic growth could nearly halve this year to 1.5 percent if rail traffic does not resume.

Poroshenko expects the government on Thursday to come up with fresh forecasts for the impact of the broader ban on the economy, energy security and currency stability.

The trade squeeze has highlighted the complicated economic relationship between the two sides and represents a new phase in a stand-off that has killed more than 10,000 people.

Germany, which has taken a leading role in trying to end the conflict, said it was seriously concerned about “increasing partitionist tendencies” in eastern Ukraine.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schaefer told a government news conference: “The danger of a military escalation is far from over.”

He said Berlin was urging Ukraine and Russia to live up to agreements made as part of the 2015 Minsk peace process, citing troubling actions by both sides, including the rebel asset seizures and the government’s decision to cut off trade.

(Additional reporting by Andrea Shalal in Berlin; Writing by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Matthias Williams and Mark Trevelyan)