BY his own admission Ahmed was a spy. On three previous occasions, Daesh fighters had arrested him but only for smoking and selling cigarettes in his hometown south of Mosul. The fourth time they came for Ahmed it was an altogether different story.

“Daesh came at night to our home and took me away to their jail,” Ahmed recalls of that evening a few weeks ago.

“They beat and questioned me, asking why I had cut my hair and shaved my beard, which is against their ruling,” he tells me.

Ahmed is not the young man’s real name. For the sake of his own security and that of his family members still trapped under Daesh rule it is wise to not to identify those who have escaped, especially if, like Ahmed, they have worked against the jihadists.

In his case they knew he had an uncle who was a captain in the Iraqi Army and suspected he was passing on information using a mobile phone.

“They said I was giving details on targets that were then bombed by the Iraqi forces and coalition,” Ahmed continued, as we sat talking in the mosque currently serving as sanctuary for hundreds of young men like him in the overcrowded Diabaga camp for displaced people east of Mosul. Asked if he was indeed providing that information to the Iraqi forces, there is a momentary pause before Ahmed replies.

“Yes, I did spy and give information, that’s why I decided that it was time for me to escape,” admits the 23 year old.

Having failed to get their confession, Daesh released Ahmed but kept him under watch, and he knew it was now only a matter of time before the jihadists would kill him.

Like many Iraqis who have managed to slip the clutches of Daesh, Ahmed used the services of a smuggler, but his family could only afford to send him alone. A few weeks later in the dead of night Ahmed joined a few lucky others in a convoy that managed to slip through the Daesh lines. Since his escape, Ahmed says he has heard nothing of his three sisters, two younger brothers, father and mother left behind.

Many who have made the attempt to flee Daesh have not been so fortunate as Ahmed. As he and I talked, one of his friends, a young man called Fared, interjected to tell how his uncle, an Arab who spoke Kurdish, had tried to contact the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters who were closing on his own village still under Daesh control.

“My uncle left one night, but stepped on a landmine and was blown up instantly,” Fared says.

For now both Ahmed and Fared live crammed alongside hundreds of other newly arrived young men at the mosque in Diabaga. It takes time for most of them to be security cleared by the Kurdish authorities for fear that they might be Daesh infiltrators

Just a few hundreds yards away in an adjacent school, hundreds more women and children are housed. On the day I visited the stench from latrines that had just been hosed out was overwhelming, the foul water swilling around the feet of children who sat in clusters with their mothers in what had been a playground.

There I met 75-year-old Nabila and her grandson Ahmed who had made the incredibly dangerous trek from their village east of Mosul fearing that they might become part of the estimated tens of thousands of civilians who have been herded up by Daesh to be used as human shields.

It’s been confirmed that there are many civilians being used by Daesh in this way as part of their resistance in Mosul against the advancing Iraqi forces that have now entered the city’s outskirts.

“We have had enough of living in fear and war all around,” Nabila told me as outside yet more new arrivals pulled up in trucks at Diabaga’s gates.

For weeks while on the frontlines I have seen countless other civilians like Nabila and little Ahmed.

Around the oil town of Qayyara south of Mosul some have been there since it was liberated weeks ago. In that intervening period the dense, black smoke billowing up from oil terminals set alight by Daesh to hide them from coalition airstrikes has continued to darken the sky and pollute the air. Here those displaced people living in the open have had their skin covered by oily black grease and many are suffering from severe respiratory problems. Even the coats on flocks of local sheep have been turned black.

Some weeks ago I watched families arrive near Qayyara, the toddlers in their flimsy plastic sandals having walked for up to eight hours across the desert scrub in searing temperatures. They had come with only what they could carry, lives distilled into a few bulging holdalls and carrier bags, their future uncertain.

In one village near to the Tigris River and close to Qayyara, I arrived to find it under the control of nervous armed tribal militias and displaced civilians sheltering in another abandoned school.

Heaps of raw garbage lay in the street outside the schoolyard, next to a waterpipe that was the only source of drinking water in the area for hundreds of people.

Inside the schoolyard, flanked by desks and blackboards, mainly men and boys congregated, some carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles.

“So far it’s too dangerous to return to our villages though they are very close, just a few kilometres away, but some Daesh are still around,” one man told me, giving only his first name as Abdul Halim.

For now soldiers of the Iraqi Army’s Special Forces and Counter Terrorism Service (CTS) as well as Kurdish Peshmerga fighters continue to push further into Mosul and hold the ground they have taken.

With every village, suburb and neighbourhood they liberate the barbaric rule and terrible conditions under which perhaps as many as one million civilians have lived under Daesh rule is there for the world to see.

“It’s like being in prison, you cannot move, it’s like a psychological war the way Daesh control everything,” one man told me near Qayyara just before I left Iraq. “There are no schools, everything is forbidden, only looting and weapons flourish,” he said.

Back in Diabaga, young Ahmed who spied against the jihadists says it will be a long time before he can return to this hometown.

“My only concern now is for my family and their safety,” he says.

“I don’t know what I would do if I learn they have been killed.”


Offensive by Iraqi special forces on edge of city is slowed by Daesh using civilians as human shield