JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia on Friday hailed the Iraq government’s recapture of Mosul city from Daesh, stressing its solidarity with Baghdad in combating “terrorism.”
The Kingdom “congratulates the Iraqi government and people for recapturing Mosul city and liberating it from the Daesh terrorist organization,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
The statement carried by SPA state news agency stressed that Riyadh “stands by Iraq and its efforts to combat extremism and terrorism in all its form, as well as its financing.”
Iraq declared victory in Mosul this week after a nearly nine-month battle that ravaged the city and took a heavy toll on residents and security forces.
Separately, the UN said on Friday that more than a million people were displaced from Mosul by the anti-Daesh battle, but nearly 200,000 have returned home.
Out of nearly 1.05 million people who fled the fighting after the offensive against Daesh began last October, 825,000 remain displaced, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a statement.
The city on the Tigris river in northern Iraq had an estimated population of 2 million in 2014.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi on Monday declared Mosul fully retaken from the terrorist group after a Western-backed operation.
But it is still near-impossible to access the Old City, where sweeping and demining operations continue.
IOM’s chief of mission in Iraq, Thomas Lothar Weiss, said the new displacement figures underscored “the enormous crisis” in the area.
Meanwhile, Iraqi police displayed 23 vehicles that had been turned into car bombs and also an anti-aircraft gun, all captured from Daesh militants during the Mosul battle.
The vehicles shown to the media were mostly civilian cars, covered in thick metal armor, with small glass ports for a driver to see through, and had been equipped with bombs.
They appear similar to vehicles used in apparent suicide attacks shown in Daesh propaganda.
Many had been painted in camouflage or blue, the color of Iraqi Federal Police vehicles, in a bid to fool surveillance aircraft into mistaking them for Iraqi forces’ vehicles.
“Heroes of the emergency rapid division and the federal police seized these cars in successful night raids,” Iraqi Federal Police Capt. Bassam Hillo Kadhim said.
Most eye-catching among the vehicles was a tank turret, complete with its gun, mounted on the back of a large truck, which police officials said had been designed to target military aircraft and ground troops from a distance.
Iraqi forces plan to destroy the vehicles.
On Friday, Iraqi forces faced further pockets of resistance from Daesh in the Old City, four days after the prime minister declared victory.
Iraqi army helicopters flew overhead and explosions could be heard, residents said, while videos of alleged revenge attacks against people detained during the retaking of Mosul underlined future security challenges.
“Three mortars landed on our district,” a resident of Faysaliya, in east Mosul, just across the Tigris river, said by telephone.
Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani, the country’s top Shiite Muslim cleric, urged Iraqis to avoid violence and sectarianism in his first Friday sermon after the victory in Mosul.