Dozens Feared Dead in Coalition-hit Mosul Building

Local Editor

Over 130 people trying to take shelter from the fighting in Mosul have been buried under the rubble of a building hit by a coalition airstrike, witnesses said in a video released by AP.

"The entire neighborhood was fleeing because of missiles that hit, so people had taken refuge here.

I didn't know if it was a shelter, I didn't know we couldn't go there. My entire family is inside, 27 people. We pulled only one of them out and don't know about the rest. Yes, he was dead," a resident of western Mosul, Ahmed Ahmed, told AP.

The witness further added that over 137 people were inside the compound.

Daesh [the Arabic acronym for the Takfiri ‘ISIS/ISIL' group] is in fact going to new lengths to make sure that civilians are killed, Kurdish journalist Hevidar Ahmed from Rudaw agency told RT.

"The terrorists have used a new tactic. They climb on the rooftops of apartment blocks. There are 10, sometimes 15 families living in such houses. Thus, the number of people is at least 100.

The terrorists don't let them leave their homes, while climbing on the rooftop and firing at Iraqi forces, trying to prevent their advance. The Iraqi troops and international coalition forces don't know that civilians are inside, and they fire back. Then, it becomes clear that there were entire families there."

Only recently, there has been a horrifying example of this, he added.

"In one of the homes, there were 135 civilians. The international coalition air forces dropped bombs on this house, and everyone who was inside died. Children, women, men, the elderly."

Hevidar Ahmed said that "in another attack, 20 people were killed, while 43 people died in a separate incident, when a car-bomb went off near civilians. Everyone died. All these incidents happened in the ‘new Mosul' neighborhood."

There are still about 700,000 people trapped in the densely populated western part of Mosul, with nearly 100,000 Iraqis fleeing the war-torn city in the past month, according to figures from the UN's International Organization for Migration [IOM].

Up to 300,000 more people may flee western Mosul, the spokesman for the UN's refugee agency, Matthew Saltmarsh, told RT.

Source: RT, Edited by website team