Got Him! ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s cousin captured in Mosul

Four of them are showing “severe signs associated with exposure to a blister agent”.

“After warning shots were fired to dislodge drivers from the vehicles a number of the trucks scattered”, said Centcom’s report.

US-led airstrikes disabled Mosul’s five bridges past year to isolate IS militants.

The five-minute video shows militants at the museum in Mosul knocking statues off their plinths and smashing them to pieces. People had blisters, they vomited. “They had irritation in the eyes and coughed”, she added.

“This is disgusting”, Lise Grande, the humanitarian coordinator in Iraq said in the statement, “there is never justification – none whatsoever – for the use of chemical weapons”.

The use of chemical weapons is a war crime and is prohibited in a series of worldwide treaties. However, subsequent tests for mustard gas agents on one of the two mortar rounds proved inconclusive. Gen. Abbas al-Jabouri, chief of staff of Iraqi police’s emergency response division, that led the attack.

Most of western Mosul is still under Islamic State group control despite a handful of recent gains on the city’s southwestern edge by Iraqi forces over the past two weeks.

On 4 January a pedestrian was killed when a moving auto carrying Isis fighters was hit, and on 14 January, another civilian died when he entered the target zone of a strike on a jihadi mortar team. Those rockets hit three neighborhoods in the eastern coast that are Al-Zuhur, Al-Mishraq and the Northern Bus Station.

“We came here with only the clothes we had on us”, one of the affected woman said. “They would love to be able to use chemical weapons against us, against the Iraqis as they move forward”, U.S. Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, told reporters in September 2016.

Iraqi forces are now advancing toward Mosul’s old city centre form the south and the southwest.

Last week, Iraqi authorities opened the Hammam al-Alil camp for service in southeastern Mosul with a capacity of 4,000 families from western Mosul.

Eastern Mosul was retaken by government forces in January 2017, after 100 days of conflict.

Civilians have been displaced in greater numbers in the past days, as the fighting rages in the middle of residential neighborhoods where populations have already been suffering for months from food, water, and electricity shortages.

About 750,000 people had been living in the west of the city before the new assault started.