MOSUL/BAGHDAD, Iraq: US-backed Iraqi forces captured the second of Mosul’s five bridges on Monday, giving a boost to their onslaught on Islamic State’s remaining stronghold in the western part of the city.
All of Mosul’s five bridges over the Tigris have been destroyed but their capture facilitates the movement of forces progressing alongside the river,which cuts Mosul in two.
The bridge seized, Al-Hurriya, is the second after one located further south. Its capture shields the back of the forces advancing toward a nearby government buildings complex.
“We control the western end of the bridge,” said a senior media officer with Rapid Response, the elite unit of the Interior Ministry leading the charge toward the complex.
Recapturing the site would help Iraqi forces attack the militants in the old city. It would also mark a symbolic step toward restoring state authority over Mosul, even though the buildings are destroyed and not being used by Daesh.
The battle of Mosul, which started on Oct. 17, will enter an more complicated phase in the densely populated old city.
Civilians have been displaced in greater numbers in the past days, as the fighting rages in the middle of residential neighborhoods where populations have already been suffering for months from food, water and electricity shortages.
Iraqi forces captured the eastern side of Mosul in January after 100 days of fighting and launched their attack on the districts that lie west of the Tigris on Feb. 19.
Defeating Daesh in Mosul would crush the Iraqi wing of the caliphate declared by the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, in 2014, over parts of Iraq and Syria.
The Iraqi foreign ministry meanwhile expressed “deep relief” at US President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Iraq from a list of countries targeted in a US travel ban.
A US-led coalition is providing key air and ground support to the Iraqi forces in the battle of Mosul.
“The decision is an important step in the right direction, it consolidates the strategic alliance between Baghdad and Washington in many fields, and at their forefront war on terrorism,” the ministry said in a statement.
Trump is expected to sign a new executive order on Monday banning travel to the United States by citizens of six Muslim-majority nations after his controversial first attempt was blocked in the courts, a White House source said
Baghdadi, Daesh’s leader, proclaimed the caliphate from Mosul’s grand Nuri mosque in the old city center which is still under his followers’ control.
“In the coming hours our forces will raise the Iraqi flag over the governorate building,” Federal Police Brig. Gen. Shaalan Ali Saleh told Reuters.
The militants have barricaded streets with civilian vehicles and rigged them with explosives to hinder the advance of Iraqi forces were also met with sniper, machine gun and mortar fire, as well as explosives dropped from light drones.
Federal Police units who also taking part in the offensive are using similar drones to hit the militants.
The Iraqi military believes several thousand militants, including many who traveled from Western and central Asian countries, are hunkered down among the remaining civilian population, which aid agencies estimated to number 750,000 in western Mosul at the start of the latest offensive.
The militants are using suicide car bombers, snipers and booby traps to counter the offensive waged by the 100,000-strong force of Iraqi troops, Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Iranian-trained Shiite Muslim paramilitary groups.
They were also reported to have fired rockets and mortar rounds filled with toxic agents from the western side of the city to the eastern, government-controlled side.
More than 40,000 fled their homes in the past week, bringing the total number of those of displaced since the start of the offensive to nearly 210,000, according to the United Nations.
Aid agencies have expressed concern that camps to accommodate people fleeing are nearly full.
The United Nations last month warned that more than 400,00 people, more than half the remaining population in western Mosul, could be displaced.
US-backed Iraqi forces capture Mosul bridge, close in on government buildings
US-backed Iraqi forces capture Mosul bridge, close in on government buildings
Dead on arrival: South Sudan’s devastated health system
- The UN says more than 5,100 civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, and warns South Sudan is on the verge of “all-out civil war”
JUBA: South Sudan’s healthcare system has been so crippled by years of corruption that when a state governor experienced high blood pressure recently, he had to fly to Kenya for treatment.
Riek Gai Kok is the governor of Jonglei state, where conflict has once again exploded between government and opposition parties.
His trip to Nairobi was recounted by humanitarians as yet another example of how South Sudan’s elite, ranked the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International, have allowed services in the country to collapse.
HIGHLIGHT
While much of east Africa has seen improving health outcomes, South Sudan is going the other way despite receiving $1.4 billion in foreign aid in 2024.
As the country tips back into civil war between rival parties, what little health care exists is almost entirely through foreign donors, with more than 80 percent provided by NGOs like the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders.
In a hospital in the capital Juba, a soldier said he was amazed to have been airlifted to hospital since most wounded are
left to die.
“(When) I was shot, I thought I was dead,” said Ajuong Deng, 33, wounded in the leg.
But it was the ICRC that rescued him — not the army or the government — treating him at their facility within the Juba Military Hospital where the NGO gives staff what it euphemistically calls “incentives” because it is not officially allowed to pay them.
“If we don’t pay them then no one stays here,” said one worker, speaking anonymously.
Government pay, normally just $10-50 monthly, has not arrived for months. “This is not what we’re supposed to be doing,” said one senior humanitarian.
In the Juba hospital, wounded lay on the floor in blood-stained bandages. A man shot in the neck struggled to breathe.
The clinicians fear these men will soon be sucked back into the country’s multiple cycles of violence: the war between the government and opposition, currently raging to the north, or between various ethnic militias and cattle raiders that plague rural areas.
“I have actually had one patient who came back four times,” said Angeth Jervas Majok, the ICRC’s head physiotherapist. “On the fifth time, unfortunately
we lost him.”
With only 300 km of paved roads, many impassable during rainy seasons, wounds often grow infected before they reach a doctor, so amputations
are common.
Yet they are stigmatized: “There is a belief that (amputees) are not a human being anymore,” said Majok. “A lot of patients cannot go back home.”
The government will not say how many soldiers have died as fighting has ramped up in
the past year.
The UN says more than 5,100 civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced, and warns South Sudan is on the verge of “all-out civil war.” The last one in the 2010s killed 400,000 people.
While much of east Africa has seen improving health outcomes, South Sudan is going the other way despite receiving $1.4 billion in foreign aid in 2024, the largest amount globally as a share of GDP.
Life expectancy is 58, according to the World Bank, unimproved since independence in 2011. Maternal mortality is 1,223 per 100,000 births, compared to 197 globally. Unicef says one in 10 children do not reach their fifth birthday.
South Sudan’s oil revenues have exceeded $25 billion since 2011, yet only one percent of this year’s budget was allocated to health and the UN has said that “vast amounts never reach the sector, let alone the population” in a country where 92 percent live beneath the poverty line.
On top of all that, South Sudan is among the most dangerous places in the world to be a health worker. MSF facilities have been attacked 11 times in the past year. The ICRC surgical unit in Juba has blast doors, and stores biscuits and water next to medical equipment in case of a siege.
The US has warned it will pull funding if governance does not improve, and NGOs are pulling back as donations fall and patience runs thin with South Sudan’s leaders.
The ICRC told AFP it planned to “draw down progressively” in one facility, while attempting to reinforce local capacity.
Information Minister Ateny Wek Ateny admitted to AFP there were liquidity “difficulties” but said the government was working on it.
He rejected Transparency International’s latest report, saying: “I don’t know what criteria they have used to rank South Sudan as the most corrupt country in the world.”
