MOSUL, Iraq (AP) – The Iraqi policemen went house to house, kicking in doors, searching through piles of belongings left behind. The Islamic State group had been driven out of this neighborhood of western Mosul, and now they were going through the slow, tedious work of search for explosives or hidden fighters.
The houses were mostly empty since their residents fled, now housed in large camps outside the city. But tension was high during the hunt. Every door or every hole in the road could hide booby traps. Snipers or suicide bombers could by anywhere.
But the police felt confident. They talked of themselves as freeing Mosul’s civilians from IS.
“They didn’t have a bite to eat. They didn’t have food or drink at all. Thankfully, now we’re gradually liberating them and getting them out of this situation,” says Mithaq Sabir, a policeman with the raiding unit in Mosul’s Dawasa district earlier this week.
But the situation is delicate. When a man approached with a cart, a policeman halted him at a distance, peered under the cart before demanding he show identification.