Daesh terrorists were barring civilians from leaving Mosul on Tuesday and using them as human shields, as the battle for the Iraqi city entered its second day, a Pentagon official said.
“We know they are being used as human shields, absolutely,” Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis told reporters.
“They are being held there against their will. We have not seen any change in the last day of people leaving or fleeing.”
Currently, the action has largely been in villages surrounding Iraq’s second-largest city and the remaining Daesh stronghold in the country.
President Barack Obama warned of “significant” displacement but said the UN and other aid groups were ready. “We have put together plans and infrastructure for dealing with a potential humanitarian crisis that are as extensive as the military plans,” Obama said.
United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said an estimated 200,000 people are expected to be displaced in the first weeks of the offensive, growing to as many as one million under a worst-case scenario.
But “what you are not seeing is a mass exodus of civilians, and that’s because they are being forcibly held there,” Davis said.
The fighting so far has been fairly light, mainly focused on traditionally Kurdish villages east of Mosul that Kurdish peshmerga fighters are reclaiming from Daesh.
Davis said terrorists were deploying suicide-car attackers and had been attempting to thwart air raids and intelligence drones by igniting giant pits full of oil and tires to create thick smoke clouds to hide their movements and positions.
Obama said: “There will be ups and downs in this process, but my expectation is that ultimately it will be successful. This will be, I think, a key milestone in what I committed to doing when Daesh first emerged.”
But the US leader warned of a challenging road ahead. “Mosul will be a difficult fight. There will be advances and there will be setbacks,” he said.
Meanwhile, Europe faces a new influx of Daesh terrorists if Iraqi forces retake Mosul, officials and analysts warned Tuesday.
Experts urged Europe to prepare itself for more battle-hardened extremists ready to launch attacks back home. “The retaking of Mosul, may lead to the return to Europe of violent Daesh fighters,” the EU’s commissioner for security Julian King told German daily Die Welt.
King stressed that even a handful of radicals returning would pose a “serious threat that we must prepare ourselves for.” Around 2,500 European fighters are still in the conflict zones, said King.
Daesh may become less appealing to potential recruits if its Iraqi stronghold were to crumble, but fighters left without a “home” would pose dangers for the West, said Raffaello Pantucci, director of International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute.
“Rudderless but without a sense of revolutionary purpose, they will present a menace to security officials around the world for years to come,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
Daesh is “entering a new phase,” said Chris Phillips, managing director of counter-terrorism consultancy Ippso, adding that as the group loses its “caliphate,” “it would force them into more guerrilla or terrorist actions.”
With the retaking of Mosul, “I think we will see a growth of terrorist attacks across North Africa and the West,” he said, adding that fighters could take cover in the routes used by refugees to slip in.
France is particularly jittery about potential returnees, as it has been hit by several terror attacks.
More than 10 officers are needed to monitor each returnee around the clock — resources that overstretched European security agencies simply do not have, security sources said.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault also pointed to the “very difficult work of deradicalization” to set back on the right track children who had been taken by their parents to Syria or Iraq, but who return radicalized.
In Germany, which took in around 900,000 asylum seekers last year alone, skepticism is running high over the newcomers particularly after two attacks in July committed by refugees in the name of Daesh.

Source: Arab News