The battle for Mosul could create another refugee exodus

As the sun set over the frontline in northern Iraq on the first day of the long anticipated Mosul offensive, Kurdish peshmerga and Iraqi army soldiers began to celebrate the first victories over Islamic State. Almost a dozen villages had been taken yesterday, and more than 77 square miles liberated southeast of the Isis stronghold.

The offensive to re-take Mosul, the last major city held by Isis in Iraq, has been more than a year in planning. It was long anticipated all along the hundreds of miles of frontline where the peshmerga and the Iraqi army have been fighting Isis. When I was in Tel Skuf in June last year, men would peer through their binoculars across the miles of flat, grassy, desiccated landscape and say ‘we’ll go when the orders come’. Mosul was only 18 miles away. For many refugees, such as the Assyrian Christians that Isis expelled and persecuted, it was frustrating.