Photo by DVIDSHUB | CC BY 2.0
Iraq is declaring victory over Isis in Mosul as the Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, wearing black military uniform, arrived in the city to congratulate his soldiers at the end of an epic nine-month long battle.
Elite Iraqi government forces raised the Iraqi flag on the banks of the Tigris River this morning, though Isis snipers are still shooting from the last buildings they hold in the Old City.
The magnitude of the victory won by the Iraqi government and its armed forces, three years after they suffered a catastrophic defeat in Mosul, is not in doubt.
A few thousand lightly equipped Isis fighters astonished the world by routing in four days an Iraqi garrison of at least 20,000 men equipped with tanks and helicopters. The recapture of Mosul now is revenge for the earlier humiliation.
The devastation in the city is huge: the closer one gets to the fighting in the centre, the greater the signs of destruction from airstrikes. Wherever Isis made a stand, Iraqi forces called in the US-led coalition to use its massive firepower to turn whole blocks into heaps of rubble and smashed masonry.
A volunteer medical worker, who wished to remain anonymous, said that on bad days “some 200 to 300 people with injuries had turned at my medical centre. I hear stories of many families dying, trapped in basements where they had been sheltering from the bombs.”
Isis gunmen have slaughtered civilians trying to escape from areas they…