ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—There might not have been civilian casualties during intense fighting between Iraqi security forces and ISIS militants at al-Salam Hospital in Mosul in December, a Rudaw follow-up into the story shows.
Following some heavy clashes between Iraqi forces and ISIS militants near al-Salam hospital in December a number of government soldiers were trapped and had to be rescued with the help of a coalition air strike.
Following the incident there were conflicting reports as to whether civilian patients fell victim to the clashes between the army and ISIS militants and subsequent air strike.
Some of the staff and patients fled the hospital before the intensification of the clashes, but others hid in a basement and an administrative office within the hospital during the days-long fighting, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Wednesday after conducting interviews with one staff worker and residents in the Wahda district where the hospital is located.
The coalition said the extremist group used the hospital as a command and control headquarters, while the staff worker told the HRW that since it took control of Mosul more than two years ago, ISIS had kept a constant presence of 10 fighters, and took over the administration.
In a propaganda video featuring British captive journalist John Cantlie days after the clashes, the extremist group showed the level of destruction at the site, and the losses of the Iraqi army, including dead bodies of some Iraqi soldiers, some of whom, HRW reported, were then dragged on the streets, while four of them hung to a bridge for days.
“There were few casualties I believe,” Cantlie said in the video, “fortunately I think the Mujahideen were able to get most of the people evacuated out of this area before the fighting started,” he explained, in reference to ISIS fighters.
ISIS had previously shown civilian casualties in its propaganda videos when it occurred, but it did not do so in this particular case, raising questions as to if civilians had been killed.
HRW also said that it “has not yet been able to verify whether any civilians were wounded in the fighting.”
Cantlie showed a piece of metal which he claimed was from a Hellfire missile, which if verified, confirms the coalition's account that it used a precision strike.
“On Dec. 7th, after Iraqi forces continued to receive heavy and sustained machine gun and rocket propelled grenade fire from ISIL fighters in a building on the hospital complex,” the coalition said in a statement. “They requested immediate support from the Coalition. In support of the Iraqi Security Forces, Coalition aircraft conducted a precision strike on the location to target enemy fighters firing on Iraqi forces.”
The Iraqi air force too has Hellfire missiles, though there are no indications if it carried out any air strikes in support of government troops around the hotspital.
Asked about civilian casualties a day after the attack, Col. John Dorrian, spokesman of the US-led coalition in Baghdad, told Rudaw “we are not exactly sure.”
“We saw no civilians observed in the area, we are not exactly sure. But we did not observe any civilians in the area and we conducted the strike in the interest of protecting the Iraqi Security Forces from firing that Daesh (ISIS) was doing from that building,” he told Rudaw TV.
Rudaw conducted interviews with health workers from Mosul in December 2014, a few months after ISIS declared its self-styled Caliphate in Mosul. They all said that the extremist group forced the health workers to work round the clock, and treat their wounded fighters, or else they would be killed or face flogging.
“ISIS arrested me in early August and kept me for around 20 days,” said Hikmat Sultan, director of Al-Salam Public Emergency Hospital in Mosul in December 2014. “They also gave me 120 lashes because a number of other doctors and I refused to go to the district of Tal Afar to treat some of their militants.”
“I am in my 50s, and the physical and psychological pain I endured during the flogging by those militants was beyond imagination,” Sultan added.
In late January, a visit by Rudaw’s team to the hospital showed that it had been destroyed beyond recognition, with 80 percent of the facility burned down.
Ayad Ibrahim, a staff worker at Salam Hospital in Mosul returned to the destroyed building. The place that no longer looked like a hospital, he said, due to the heavy fighting.
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