Mosul air strikes kill dozens of civilians

UN stunned by multiple civilian casualties

BAGHDAD: Air strikes carried out in recent days have killed dozens of civilians in west Mosul, where Iraqi forces are battling jihadists, officials said on Saturday.

Both Iraqi aircraft and a US-led international coalition are bombing the Islamic State group in the Mosul area.

"There are dozens of bodies still under the rubble," Bashar al-Kiki, the head of the Nineveh provincial council, told AFP.

Nawfal Hammadi, the governor of Nineveh, of which Mosul is the capital, said the coalition had carried out the strikes in the city’s Mosul al-Jadida area, killing "more than 130 civilians."

"The Daesh terrorist organisation is seeking to stop the advance of the Iraqi forces in Mosul at any cost, and it is gathering civilians... and using them as human shields," Hammadi told AFP, using an Arabic acronym for IS.

Other officials said that hundreds of people had died in the strikes. It was not possible to independently confirm the tolls.

An Iraqi brigadier general said that strikes had damaged more than 27 residential buildings and that three of them were completely destroyed.

The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the strikes were carried out after IS targeted military aircraft and attacked Iraqi forces with sniper fire.

IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, but Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes have since retaken most of the territory they lost.

Iraqi forces launched the operation to recapture Mosul in October, retaking the east of the city before setting their sights on the smaller but more densely populated west.

More than 200,000 people have fled fighting in west Mosul since the operation to retake the area from Jihadists was launched last month, Iraq’s ministry of migration and displaced said on Saturday.

The battle for west Mosul -- the most populated urban area still held by the Islamic State group -- was launched on February 19, and Iraqi forces have since recaptured a series of neighbourhoods from the Jihadists.

"The number of displaced from the areas of the right bank (west side) of the city of Mosul has risen to 201,275 people," the ministry said in a statement.

IS overran large areas north and west of Baghdad in 2014, but Iraqi forces backed by US-led air strikes have since retaken most of the territory they lost.

Iraqi forces launched the operation to recapture Mosul in October, retaking the east of the city before setting their sights on the smaller but more densely populated west.

The United Nations said on Thursday that there were some 600,000 people still in west Mosul, 400,000 of whom are "trapped" in the Old City area under siege-like conditions.

The United Nations expressed profound concern on Saturday over reports of an incident in the

battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul that caused a high number of civilian casualties.

"We are stunned by this terrible loss of life," Lise Grande, the humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, said in a statement.

Local officials and residents said on Thursday that dozens of people were buried in collapsed buildings after an air raid against Islamic State militants in the al-Aghawat al-Jadidah district triggered a huge explosion last week.