The site of a strike in Yabisat, West Mosul. On March 5th, 2017, as the battle to retake Mosul from ISIS raged, 21 relatives of Abdul Aziz Ahmed Araj were killed in a series of airstrikes, conducted by US military warplanes, aimed at targeting what American forces had come to believe was an ISIS chemical weapons facility.
Rahaf, 10, was the sole survivor of an airstrike in Al Tanak that killed 11 members of her family. A strike in 2017 targeted a residence that military observers believed was exclusively used by ISIS fighters.
Mosul, Iraq - Rafi al-Iraqi and his son standing amid the rubble of their home in Mosul, Iraq. On Jan. 6, 2017, the target was a house assessed to be used exclusively as an ISIS “foreign fighter headquarters” and “artillery staging location.” But the blast destroyed several nearby homes as well, killing 16 civilians. Among them were three of the children of Rafi al-Iraqi, a local trader from a leading Maslawi family. The only survivors of the strike, besides al-Iraqi, were his mother and his 12-year-old son.
Destroyed cars near the site of a bombing that killed more than 15 people, including the children of Rafi al Iraqi.
Abdul Aziz Ahmed Araj, right, and his brother Saddam amid the ruins of the warehouse where their brother and other family members were killed in the Yabisat neighbourhood of West Mosul.
In 2017, during the battle to retake Mosul, Fatima Abdullah Younes (4) was disabled after a US airstrike hit a neighbour’s house, killing 11 people.
On Nov. 6, 2016, a strike was intended to hit a car carrying members of ISIS, but the explosion was so large that it destroyed two nearby cars as well. In one of them, Younes Mahmood Thanoun, pictured here, was traveling with his father. He was thrown from the vehicle and badly wounded. When he realized that his father was trapped in the flaming car, he tried to drag himself back to the vehicle but was shot by an ISIS fighter, who feared that this activity would cause the jets to drop another bomb, he said. Younes’s father and two other civilians died in the strike. According to the Pentagon’s report, which included no finding of wrongdoing, the explosion was so large because a decision was made to save lower-collateral weapons for future strikes.
The remnants of the car Younes and family were in in when they were hit lays rusting near the site of the attack.
Early one morning, a scrap vendor named Ali set out from his home in West Mosul with his trusty red cart, which he usually filled with cans, bottles and metal — whatever he might be able to sell. That day he was looking for a wheat-grinding machine to turn his family’s wheat into flour. When he didn’t return in the afternoon, his mother, Ruzqaya, pictured here, began to worry. She wound up searching for more than a month before she found his cart, near the site of a coalition airstrike that had targeted an ISIS mortar position. “The person pushing the cart appears to have been struck by ejecta from the blast,” the military’s credibility assessment states. “The person pushing the cart was not associated with the strike and is presumed to be a civilian.” According to eyewitnesses, Ali died almost instantly from shrapnel to the head.
On April 29, a strike targeted the notorious Australian ISIS recruiter Neil Prakash, who was believed to be staying at a bed-down location in Mosul. American officials confirmed that the strike killed Prakash, as well as four civilians. But several months later, Prakash was found alive, trying to cross into Turkey. Among the injured was Hassan Aleiwi Muhammad Sultan, pictured here, now 16, who was playing soccer nearby and still has shrapnel in his spinal cord. His family can barely afford his wheelchair. Despite concluding long ago that four civilians were killed, the U.S.-led coalition has never contacted any of the survivors.
Fatima Ahmed Araj (19) is paralysed from the waste down after her brothers house was hit by a Coalition airstrike in March 2017.
The Maydan district in the ‘Old City’ of Mosul, where ISIS made their last stand, was the most heavily destroyed part of the city and to this day remains in ruins.
Following orders from ISIS to evacuate their West Mosul neighborhood, two brothers, Majid Mahmood Ahmed and Firas Mahmood Ahmed, were driving with their families in two cars across town. At the same time, coalition forces were monitoring surveillance video of the area, looking to strike what intelligence had indicated was an up-armored vehicle carrying a car bomb. An official mistakenly identified the brothers’ cars as those carrying car bombs, and the strike was authorized. “I remember there was a big explosion, and I fainted,” said Abdul Hakeem Abdullah Hamash al-Aqeedi, pictured above. The cars were passing his house when the weapon hit. He lost an eye and had a plate put into his left leg. His son, Mustafa Hakeem Abdullah, had his left leg amputated from the thigh down. His nephew, who had been a nursing-school student, lost four toes on his left foot and one on his right foot and still has shrapnel in his leg. The brothers and their family members in the cars were all killed.
A shirt lay amid the rubble of the house where Rafi al-Iraqi and his family were living when it was hit by an airstrike.
Aseel Muhammad Younes (6) was injured and her father killed in an airstrike in March 2017.