While Iraqi forces battle the Islamic State in west Mosul, intelligence services work in the east, to hunt down former members of the group. But those detained say the arrests are random and unjust.

Members of the NSS with detainees in Mosul. Source: NSS website

A few hours after the Iraqi army announced that the eastern side of Mosul had been recaptured and members of the extremist group known as the Islamic State had been driven out, a new military force entered the city. The members of this group wear masks, carry only light weapons and they have laptops with them. They are members of Iraq’s National Security Service, a primarily intelligence gathering unit rather than a fighting force, and they are on the hunt for members of the Islamic State, or IS, group who may now be hiding among the civilian population of the city.

This is not an easy task given the hundreds of thousands of non-combatants that remained on the eastern side of the city while fighting was going on, and who remain there to this day.

“Over the past two months there has not been a single day when we have not arrested members of the IS group, or collaborators,” says Alaa al-Zaidi, one of the men serving in the National Security Service, or NSS. “But it’s really hard and it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

When the Iraqi military entered the eastern side of Mosul, the foreign fighters with the IS group fled across the Tigris river into the western side of the city, where fighting still rages. But the Iraqi fighters could hide among the locals, al-Zaidi explains. “They shaved their beards and got rid of any signs that they were IS. Some of them even went out onto the street to celebrate the Iraqi soldiers’ arrival. But in fact they are criminals responsible for the deaths of dozens of Mosul’s residents,” al-Zaidi continued. “Some of them are still supporting the IS group, or starting up a new set of sleeper cells in the city.”

Indeed, only a few weeks after the Iraqi military announced that the IS group had been pushed out of eastern Mosul there were several suicide bomb attacks targeting restaurants and markets on that side of the city. The attacks happened despite the presence of thousands of soldiers and police in Mosul.

The NSS’ main problem is a lack of information, given that Mosul has been an information black hole since the IS group took over. Additionally, the IS group killed or otherwise targeted many of the city’s former police officers and soldiers, which meant that hardly any security information has leaked out of the city.

“The NSS has now recruited a number of residents who stayed in the city, and asked them to act as informants,” al-Zaidi explained. “They even accompany the security forces when they do raids, looking for disguised IS members, or IS fighters in hiding. But they usually cover their faces with a scarf so that they cannot be identified. They are concerned about revenge,” the NSS member explained.

The NSS has also set up a special phone number that residents can call and give information on extremists who may have snuck back into their neighbourhoods. As yet, the response has been limited, al-Zaidi admits. “Perhaps people are afraid of getting involved, or they are worried about reprisals from extremists,” he suggests.

While the NSS may have a legitimate job to do, reports from some of the Mosul locals who were arrested on suspicion of IS membership are far from glowing.

One of these, Waleed al-Jibouri*, a resident of the Karamah neighbourhood in eastern Mosul, spoke to NIQASH on the phone from the displaced persons camp where he and his family now reside. Al-Jibouri was arrested by the NSS on suspicion of IS membership and taken to a detention centre south of Mosul and interrogated. He was eventually able to prove that he had not collaborated with the IS group and released.

“The situation in eastern Mosul is so frightening right now. It is chaotic and people are taking revenge on one another,” al-Jibouri said. “Some informant told the Iraqi army that I had collaborated with the extremists. The IS group killed my brother, a police officer, and they also whipped me for smoking. Why would they work with me? They would not trust me!”

Al-Jibouri also says that the NSS move around the city accompanied by fighters from the Shiite Muslim militias, who are often provocative, he says. They carry their own flags and drive around the city in SUVs, blasting Shiite religious music – anathema to a Sunni Muslim-majority town.

Al-Jibouri spent two weeks in detention centres south of the city before he was released. “The detention centre conditions are very bad and every day dozens more detainees arrive,” he said. “I knew some of them and I knew they were innocent. I think these arrests are being carried out in a random and unconstructive way; nobody is following any rules at all.”

After he was arrested, al-Jibouri left Mosul with his family, having decided he would rather live in a displaced persons camps.

“The investigating officers don’t take into account the fact that many residents were forced to work with the IS group, in civil jobs,” adds Qasim al-Obaidi*, who was also held in detention for several days before clearing his name. “Many people were forced to work with the IS group or starve to death, along with their families. They were cleaning the streets or collecting garbage or fixing water pipes. And now they are considered just as bad as those IS members who killed others. That is not fair.”

The NSS is not just limited to hunting out former IS members in Mosul. They are also searching for the extremists’ various headquarters and trying to locate bomb-making factories. Last week, the NSS announced they were able to find a large factory for the making of improvised explosive devices hidden in one of Mosul’s suburbs.

The NSS is also responsible for all of the digital material and paperwork that is found, that has been left behind by the IS group.

“We have found thousands of items of correspondence in the city,” a lieutenant in the Iraqi army, Omran al-Khazaei, told NIQASH. “These are very important because the IS group was managing all of its affairs in Iraq and Syria from Mosul.”

A few days ago pro-government forces found around 3,000 important documents in the Muthanna neighbourhood of Mosul, he continued. There were CDs, laptops and printed documents, all of which have the names of thousands of IS members in Iraq and Syria, their addresses and nationalities as well as financial records on the organisation’s commercial activities.”

Al-Khazaei says the information has been sent to Baghdad where it will take months to analyse them fully.

*Names of those arrested in Mosul have been changed, for security reasons.</s>HAMMAM AL-ALIL CAMP, Iraq: The husband of Orouba Abdelhamid was killed in a rocket strike when Iraqi government forces arrived in her home city Mosul as part of the military campaign to expel Islamic State fighters.

The 31-year-old Orouba was then trapped at home for days as her district in western Mosul turned into a battle zone between the government and the militants defending their last stronghold

in Iraq. She eventually managed to flee with her three children.

"No one is left for me over there so I came here ... I cannot return to the house," she told Reuters, sitting in the tent she shares with her brother's family in the Hammam al-Alil camp, which is home to some 30,000 displaced people.

Orouba was eventually reunited with her brother in the camp after the two had had little contact since Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014 and banned mobile phones under their extreme version of Sunni Islam.

Those who have fled Iraq's second largest city describe a gruelling journey, where in some instances entire neighbourhoods have left together, often at daybreak, sometimes under mortar shelling or air strikes.

Fathers covered their children's eyes, neighbours helped carry the disabled, and men were often separated from their wives to be questioned by the Iraqi army manning the checkpoints around the city.

Like many others, Gorha Mahmoud said she and her family walked for 48 hours in the rain and cold before reaching Hammam al-Alil. They had to wait a further 24 hours at the entrance gate as there was no tent for them at first.

In the camp, a semblance of normality has returned for the families. Children over six attend morning classes, women carry out domestic chores while men look for work and food.

"Here life is normal. The aid is plentiful and the people are nice," Orouba said.

The United Nations refugee agency said in March it had opened two new camps to host those fleeing the fighting in Mosul, adding 40,000 places to its existing facilities.

More than 302,000 people have left Mosul since the military campaign began in October, according to the International Organization for Migration. Around 30,000 people were displaced

Even worse, some 400,000 people are still trapped in western

Mahmoud Abu Mohamed, who lives in a tent around the corner from Orouba after also fleeing from Mosul with his family, said the government needed to restore water in the city and remove dangerous debris from the fighting before people would return.

"If the water returns, everyone will go back," he said.</s>MOSUL (Sputnik) – He called for an investigation into the US-led coalition's airstrike killing civilians.

"Three hundred civilians were either killed or wounded in fighting in in the western part of Mosul," Khajem said, adding that the numbers of victims could be much higher.

Iraqi media reported that at least 200 people, many of whom were civilians, were killed in recent airstrikes in Mosul.

Iraqi President Fuad Masum described in an interview to Sputnik earlier in March the situation in Mosul as a humanitarian catastrophe due to the civilian deaths, but urged to continue recapturing the city, since "it would not be sensible to leave the city to terrorists." He called for investigation into the mistakes made by US-led coalition airstrikes two weeks before to establish "whether there was a communication failure, whether the information was erroneous" and noted that the operation in that part of Mosul was postponed in order to find more appropriate methods to fight the militants.</s>The husband of Orouba Abdelhamid was killed in a rocket strike when Iraqi government forces arrived in her home city of Mosul as part of the military campaign to expel Islamic State fighters.

The 31-year-old Orouba was then trapped at home for days as her district in western Mosul turned into a battle zone between the government and the militants defending their last stronghold in Iraq. She eventually managed to flee with her three children.

“No one is left for me over there so I came here ... I cannot return to the house,” she told Reuters, sitting in the tent she shares with her brother’s family in the Hammam al-Alil camp, which is home to about 30,000 displaced people.

Orouba was eventually reunited with her brother in the camp after the two had had little contact since Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014 and banned mobile phones under their extreme version of Sunni Islam.

Those who have fled Iraq’s second largest city describe a grueling journey, where in some instances entire neighborhoods have left together, often at daybreak, sometimes under mortar shelling or airstrikes.

Fathers covered their children’s eyes, neighbors helped carry the disabled, and men were often separated from their wives to be questioned by the Iraqi army manning the checkpoints around the city.

Like many others, Gorha Mahmoud said she and her family walked for 48 hours in the rain and cold before reaching Hammam al-Alil. They had to wait a further 24 hours at the entrance gate because there was no tent for them at first.

In the camp, a semblance of normality has returned for the families. Children 6 and older attend morning classes, women carry out domestic chores while men look for work and food.

“Here life is normal. The aid is plentiful and the people are nice,” Orouba said.

The United Nations refugee agency said in March it had opened two new camps to host those fleeing the fighting in Mosul, adding 40,000 places to its existing facilities.

More than 302,000 people have left Mosul since the military campaign began in October, according to the International Organization for Migration. Around 30,000 people were displaced last week alone.

However, about 400,000 people are trapped in western Mosul while the battles rage.

Mahmoud Abu Mohamed, who lives in a tent around the corner from Orouba after also fleeing from Mosul with his family, said the government needed to restore water in the city and remove dangerous debris from the fighting before people would return.

“If the water returns, everyone will go back,” he said.</s>MOSUL/ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Tuesday it was expanding camps for people fleeing Mosul, as air strikes resumed on Islamic State positions in Iraq’s second largest city.

An Iraqi boy sits on a piece of debris in a street of Mosul, Iraq, April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Andres Martinez Casares

More than 300,000 people have fled Mosul since the start of the U.S.-backed campaign in October, the office of the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq said in a statement.

Before the operation to drive Islamic State from the city began, Mosul had a population of about a million and half, split about evenly between the areas east and west of the Tigris river that runs through the middle.

Iraqi forces captured the eastern side in January and in February launched a second phase to take the western side, with air and ground support from a U.S.-led coalition.

They are now battling to take the northwestern part, but the civilian death toll has mounted in the old city, where the militants are dug in amongst residents.

More people are expected to flee the fighting and camps for the displaced north and east of Mosul are expanding, the U.N. statement said.

Air strikes on the city by the Iraqi air force resumed on Tuesday as the sky cleared after several days of bad weather, the Iraqi military said.

The Iraqi air force carried out at least three air strikes in western Mosul, killing several dozens of Islamic State fighters, according to Iraqi military statements on Tuesday.

A number of Islamic State commanders were killed in an air strike on a position in Hay al-Tanak, a stronghold of the group, they said.

Among those killed were commanders in charge of booby traps, of Arab suicide fighters and child recruitment, the statement added, without identifying them by name. The two other strikes killed militants and destroyed weapons and vehicles.

Islamic State’s media outlets did not mention the strikes when they aired comments from Abi al-Hassan Al-Muhajer, who took over the role of spokesman after the death last year of the group’s notorious media head, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, in an air strike.

“O soldiers of the caliphate, beware not to withdraw from any inch before turning it into hell,” he said in an audio recording on Telegram, echoing a similar call made by Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi when the campaign on Mosul started.

“Ambush them in the houses, the alleyways and the streets, mine the arcades and carry out raid after raid,” he said.

“NO FOOD”

A Reuters TV crew saw dozens of people fleeing their homes near or across the frontline, braving sniper and mortar fire, while a helicopter strafed positions further north.

“Shells were falling on us and there is no food, no water, no electricity,” said Hamda Bakheet, a woman in her mid-60s from the Nablus district, adding that the militants were firing on people who leave the city.

Bakheet said one of her sons was killed when the Islamists first overran Mosul and the other was accused of being a “renegade” and jailed a year ago. “I hope the army will free him soon.”

The improved weather should also allow ground forces to resume their advance toward the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, where Baghdadi, declared a “caliphate” nearly three years ago over parts of Iraq and Syria.

Heavy fighting with machine guns, rocket propelled grenade launchers and mortars was heard by the Reuters TV crew coming from the area around the mosque, located in the old city and famous for its leaning minaret.

The current phase of the campaign is the most difficult as narrow alleyways in the densely populated old city limit the use of artillery, air power and armoured vehicles.

An explosion in western Mosul last month killed between 60 and 240 people, according to various accounts.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, flew into Iraq on Monday with the top U.S. general to get a first-hand assessment of the battle against Islamic State from U.S. commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders.

Slideshow (6 Images)

The trip comes as Trump examines ways to accelerate a campaign that U.S. and Iraqi officials say has so far largely succeeded in uprooting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

In the first official remarks by the group referring to Trump since he took office, the Islamic State spokesman Al-Muhajer said: “... You (the U.S.) are bankrupt and the signs of your demise are evident to every eye.”

“... There is no more evidence than the fact that you are being run by an idiot who does not know what Syria or Iraq or Islam is,” he said.</s>The husband of Orouba Abdelhamid was killed in a rocket strike when Iraqi government forces arrived in her home city Mosul as part of the military campaign to expel Islamic State fighters.

The 31-year-old Orouba was then trapped at home for days as her district in western Mosul turned into a battle zone between the government and the militants defending their last stronghold in Iraq. She eventually managed to flee with her three children.

“No one is left for me over there so I came here … I cannot return to the house,” she told Reuters, sitting in the tent she shares with her brother’s family in the Hammam al-Alil camp, which is home to some 30,000 displaced people.

Orouba was eventually reunited with her brother in the camp after the two had had little contact since Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014 and banned mobile phones under their extreme version of Sunni Islam.

Those who have fled Iraq’s second largest city describe a gruelling journey, where in some instances entire neighbourhoods have left together, often at daybreak, sometimes under mortar shelling or air strikes.

Fathers covered their children’s eyes, neighbours helped carry the disabled, and men were often separated from their wives to be questioned by the Iraqi army manning the checkpoints around the city.

Like many others, Gorha Mahmoud said she and her family walked for 48 hours in the rain and cold before reaching Hammam al-Alil. They had to wait a further 24 hours at the entrance gate as there was no tent for them at first.

In the camp, a semblance of normality has returned for the families. Children over six attend morning classes, women carry out domestic chores while men look for work and food.

“Here life is normal. The aid is plentiful and the people are nice,” Orouba said.

The United Nations refugee agency said in March it had opened two new camps to host those fleeing the fighting in Mosul, adding 40,000 places to its existing facilities.

More than 302,000 people have left Mosul since the military campaign began in October, according to the International Organization for Migration. Around 30,000 people were displaced last week alone.

Even worse, some 400,000 people are still trapped in western Mosul while the battles rage.

Mahmoud Abu Mohamed, who lives in a tent around the corner from Orouba after also fleeing from Mosul with his family, said the government needed to restore water in the city and remove dangerous debris from the fighting before people would return.

“If the water returns, everyone will go back,” he said.

For all the latest World News, download Indian Express App now</s>Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and top adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, has said during a visit to Iraq he is optimistic that the Iraqi military campaign to retake Mosul from Islamic State (IS) militants will be successful.

Visiting a base 16 kilometers from Mosul, Kushner said on April 4, "I hope the victory that you have in Mosul in the near future will not just be a victory for the American and Iraqi troops but it will be a victory for the world."

Kushner is traveling with Marine General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Kushner also visited Baghdad and Irbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, during his two-day trip.

In Irbil, Kushner and Dunford met with Kurdish leader Masud Barzani and Masrur Barzani, the chancellor of the region's Security Council.

Barzani wrote on Twitter that the meeting was "productive" and said officials discussed the war against IS "and plans for the day after."

The trip has demonstrated the growing power of Kushner, 36, in the Trump administration. He has been given a wide range of domestic- and foreign-policy duties, including working on a Middle East peace deal.

Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP</s>Turkish families seek answers over relatives’ disappearances

After 100 days behind bars over accusations of belonging to a Turkish “terrorist organization,” Mustafa Yilmaz was relieved to be back with his wife and daughter and allowed to return to work. But his problems were far from over. On Feb. 19, six weeks after his release, he disappeared.

His wife, Sumeyye Yilmaz, says CCTV footage shows him being confronted outside their home after leaving for work and taken by two men before a black van passes by.

She fears he is now being held by “deep state” operatives and possibly tortured.

Yilmaz is one of 28 men that rights activists and lawmakers say have been disappeared by security forces since a failed coup in July 2016.

Twenty-five of them have since reappeared — either they turned up in the custody of the authorities or near a mountain somewhere in Turkey — but Yilmaz and two others are still missing.

The activists and MPs say that many of the 28 were tortured — the government says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward torture.

“Why is my partner not being released? What do they want to do? Is he still alive?” Sumeyye, 27, said in an interview with AFP, as their two-year-old daughter played nearby.

“In the first few days he was taken, my daughter would ask ‘Where is he?’ But now she has stopped. She’s a child, she’s forgetting,” she said, through tears.

Yilmaz, 33, was one of six men who disappeared within a few days of each other in Ankara, Istanbul, the southern city of Antalya and the northwestern province of Edirne in February.

All of them had been accused of ties to an Islamic organization run by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara claims ordered the 2016 attempted coup.

On July 28, the families were told that four of the missing were being held by Ankara police. Yilmaz and another man, Gokhan Turkmen, were not among them, which hit Sumeyye particularly hard.

“The period after July 28 was like hell for me,” she said. Both Mustafa and Sumeyye were accused of ties to the Gulen group — a charge that has seen tens of thousands of people arrested or stripped of their jobs since the coup bid. The couple denies the claims.

SPEEDREAD Yilmaz is one of 28 men that rights activists and lawmakers say have been disappeared by security forces since a failed coup in July 2016.

However, Mustafa, a physiotherapist, was arrested last October and sentenced to six years in prison. He was out pending an appeal when he disappeared.

The nightmare began for Sumeyye when she received a call from her husband’s employer at around 11:00 a.m. to say he had not shown up for work.

First, she called hospitals, and even at one point feared he could have run off.

But she became suspicious when the authorities showed little interest, and she says the police are still not doing enough to find her husband.

“No effective investigation ... or procedure has been started,” Sumeyye said, adding it was “still not too late” to find him.

Human Rights Watch says the six men taken in February were “forcibly disappeared” and the four who re-emerged have been denied lawyers.

It said their wives had described them as traumatized.

Lawmaker Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, of the pro-Kurdish leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party who spearheaded a social media campaign to try to find the six, said he believed they had been tortured. “They were in a wretched state. When the families asked where they had been, the men said: ‘Close this issue, leave it alone’,” said Gergerlioglu.

Those who took them wanted “to interrogate them for a long time,” he added. The four men have since been formally charged over suspected Gulen links.

“I assume that the goal here is to spread terror” among suspected Gulen supporters, said Ozturk Turkdogan, head of the Turkish Human Rights Association.

“Obviously our main suspect is the state,” he added.

Turkdogan said the disappearances often followed a similar pattern, particularly the use of black VW Transporters, according to CCTV images or witnesses.

Contacted by AFP, no comment was provided by the Ankara public prosecutor’s office and police, while the Interior Ministry did not respond to requests.

Cases of missing people have been rare in Turkey since the 1990s, and activists are concerned by the rising number since 2016.

Since the four men’s reappearance, another case has come to light. The family of father-of-three Yusuf Bilge Tunc, 35, have said he was taken by unknown individuals on Aug. 6.

Tunc was accused of Gulen ties — claims which he denied — and fired from his job at the state agency overseeing the defense industry.

His family says police claim to have no information on his whereabouts, but that one officer suggested he had run off.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was a problem between us ... why would he not say anything to his parents?” asked Tunc’s wife, who did not wish to be named.

“The most painful thing in the world is not knowing what has happened to him.” Like Sumeyye, they have appealed for help from the European Court of Human Rights and the UN.

Tunc’s wife also claimed police had not bothered to search his car when it was found four days after he went missing. “I never thought this kind of thing could happen to us,” she said.</s>More room needed for people streaming from city to escape fighting between US-backed Iraqi forces and ISIL.

The United Nations has said it is expanding camps for displaced people around the battered Iraqi city of Mosul as the number of displaced people hit 300,000, and a US-backed assault on ISIL there continued.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Tuesday that a total of 392,000 people had fled their homes since the Iraqi government offensive to push the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group from the city began in October. Some 94,500 have since returned, it said.

The International Organization for Migration puts the number of displaced at 302,400.

Mosul had a pre-campaign population of about a million and half, split more or less evenly between the sides lying east and west of the Tigris river that runs through its middle.

Iraqi forces captured the eastern side in January and in February launched a second phase to take the western side, with air and ground support from a US-led coalition.

They are now battling to take the northwestern part, but the civilian death toll has mounted in the densely populated Old City, where the fighters are dug in.

More people are expected to flee the fighting and camps for the displaced north and east of Mosul are expanding, the UN statement said.

Bombing raids on the city by the Iraqi air force resumed on Tuesday as the sky cleared after several days of bad weather, the Iraqi military said.

A number of ISIL commanders were killed in an air raid on a position in Hay al-Tanak, a stronghold of the group in the west of Mosul, the army said in statement.

Among those killed were commanders in charge of booby traps, of suicide fighters and child recruitment, the statement added, without identifying them by name.

The improved weather should also allow ground forces to resume their advance towards the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, where ISIL's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a "caliphate" nearly three years ago over parts of Iraq and Syria.</s>ERBIL, Iraq, April 4 (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Tuesday it is expanding camps for displaced people around Mosul, as air strikes resumed on Islamic State positions in Iraq's second largest city.

More than 300,000 people have fled Mosul since the start of the U.S.-backed campaign in October, the office of the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq said in a statement.

Mosul had a pre-campaign population of about a million and half, split more or less evenly between the sides lying east and west of the Tigris river that runs through the middle.

Iraqi forces captured the eastern side in January and in February launched a second phase to take the western side, with air and ground support from a U.S.-led coalition.

They are now battling to take the northwestern part, but the civilian death toll has mounted in the densely populated Old City, where the militants are dug in amongst residents.

More people are expected to flee the fighting and camps for the displaced north and east of Mosul are expanding, the U.N. statement said.

Air strikes on the city by the Iraqi air force resumed on Tuesday as the sky cleared after several days of bad weather, the Iraqi military said.

A number of Islamic State commanders were killed in an air strike on a position in Hay al-Tanak, a stronghold of the group in the west of Mosul, the Iraqi military said in statement.

Among those killed were commanders in charge of booby traps, of Arab suicide fighters and child recruitment, the statement added, without identifying them by name.

Islamic State media outlets did not mention the strike.

The improved weather should also allow ground forces to resume their advance toward the Grand al-Nuri Mosque, where the militants' leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, declared a "caliphate" nearly three years ago over parts of Iraq and Syria.

The current phase of the campaign is the most difficult as narrow alleyways in the densely populated old city limit the use of artillery, air power and armoured vehicles.

An explosion in western Mosul last month killed between 60 and 240 people, according to various accounts.

U.S. President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, flew into Iraq on Monday with the top U.S. general to get a first-hand assessment of the battle against Islamic State from U.S. commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders.

The trip comes as Trump examines ways to accelerate a campaign that U.S. and Iraqi officials say has so far largely succeeded in uprooting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. (Editing by Giles Elgood)
The United Nations announces expansion of civilian camps for people fleeing Mosul, following resumption of airstrikes on ISIL-held portions of the Iraqi city.