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Iraqi forces haveopened exit routes for hundreds of people to flee the Old City of Mosulwith the United Nations voicing alarm at the rising civilian death toll and the unimaginablerisks trapped residents face.

Troops are battlingto retake the Old City district from Isisfighters mounting a last stand in the final major city they hold in the country.

Urban warfare units have been channelling their onslaught along two perpendicular streets that converge in the heart of the Old City, aiming to isolate the jihadist insurgents in four pockets.

The week-old battle in the Old City is turning into the deadliest of the eight-month US-backed campaign to take back the northern city, which fell to Isis in June 2014.

I saw ayoung girl with facial injuries walking dazed and shocked across the frontline out of heavily-populated district with a group of neighbours. All her family was killed when their house collapsed, they said.

The United Nations has said as many as 12 civilians were killed and hundreds injured in fightingon Friday.

Fighting is very intense in the Old City and civilians are at extreme, almost unimaginable risk. There are reports that thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of people are being held as human shields [by Isis],Lise Grande, the UNhumanitarian coordinator in Iraq, said in a statement. Hundreds of civilians, including children, are being shot.

Iraqi authorities are hoping to declare victory in the northern Iraqi city in the Muslim Eid holiday, which marks the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, during the next few days.

Helicopter gunships were assisting the ground thrust, firing at insurgent emplacements in the Old City.The government advance was carving out escape corridors for civilians marooned behind Isis lines.

There was a steady trickle of fleeing families on Saturday, some with injured and malnourished children. My baby only had bread and water for the past eight days, one mother said.

At least 100 civilians reached the safety of a government-held area west of the Old City in one 20-minute period, tired, scared and hungry. Soldiers gave them food and water.

More than 100,000 civilians, of whom half are believed to be children, remain trapped in the crumbling old houses of the Old City, with little food, water or medical treatment.

Related video: Mosul residents on Isis blowing up Grand al-Nuri Mosque

The urban-warfare forces were leading the campaign to clear the Sunni Islamist militants from the maze of Old City alleyways, moving on foot house-to-house in locations too cramped for the use of armoured combat vehicles.

A US-led international coalition is providing ground and air support in the eight-month-old campaign to seize Mosul, the largest city Isiscame to control in a shock offensive in Iraq and neighbouring Syria three years ago.

Iraqi government offensives supported by the coalition have wrested back several important urban centres in the countrys west and north from Isis over the past 18 months.

Military analysts said Baghdads campaign to recover Mosul gathered pace after the jihadi group blew up the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque with its famous leaning minaret on Wednesday.

The mosques destruction, while condemned by Iraqi and UNauthorities as another cultural crime by the jihadists, gave troops more freedom to press their onslaught as they no longer had to worry about damaging the ancient site.

It was from the mosque that Isisleader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi announced himself to the world for the first time as the caliph, or ruler of all Muslims, in July 2014. Mosuls population at the time was more than twomillion.

Baghdadi fled into the desert expanse extending across Iraq and Syria in the early phase of the Mosul offensive, leaving the fighting there to local Isiscommanders, according to USand Iraqi officials. Recent Russian reports that he was killed have not been confirmed by the coalition or Iraqi authorities.

The Iraqi government once hoped to take Mosul by the end of 2016, but the campaign dragged on as Isis reinforced positions in inner-city neighbourhoods of the citys western half, carried out suicide car and motorbike bomb attacks, laid booby traps and kept up barrages of sniper and mortar fire.

By Saturday, the area still under Isiscontrol was less than twosquare kilometres (0.77 sq miles),skirting the western bank of the Tigris River that bisects Mosul.

Isisretaliated for government advances on Friday evening with a triple bombing in a neighbourhood in eastern Mosul, which Baghdads forces recaptured in January. The attack was carried out by three people who detonated explosive belts, killing five, including three policemen, and wounding 19, according to a military statement on Saturday.

The fall of Mosul would mark the end of the Iraqi half of the so-called-Caliphateas a quasi-state structure, but Isiswould still hold sizeable, mainly rural and small-town tracts of both Iraq and Syria.

In eastern Syria, The de facto Isis capital, Raqqa, is now nearly encircled by a US-backed Kurdish-led coalition.

Reuters

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Iraq forces help hundreds of civilians escape Isis-held Mosul as UN warns of 'unimaginable' risk to life - The Independent