Iraqi special forces evacuate villages close to Mosul

The line of cars flying white flags kept on coming Tuesday as Iraqi forces began to evacuate residents of the last villages near the Islamic State group bastion of Mosul.And it was not just people. Some vehicles had animals perched on piles of blankets amid foam mattresses and plastic buckets of clothing.

Units of Iraq's elite counter-terrorism force were just half a dozen kilometres (four miles) from Mosul, where IS two years ago proclaimed its "caliphate" and which is now being targeted by Kurdish and Iraqi forces backed by the international coalition.The advance on Mosul, Iraq's second city, has been rapid so far.

Villages emptied of their populations since the arrival of the Jihadists in mid-2014 were quickly retaken.Just a few inhabited villages lie ahead of them now, and they are evacuating the people who live there.People like Essam



Saadou, a 22-year-old student at the wheel of a car crowded with three women and two children.

"We've brought nothing with us. We took to the road despite all the dangers. We have just the car and the clothes we're wearing," Saadou told AFP at a Kurdish checkpoint where families were being put on buses to nearby camps constructed recently on the plain.

"The counter-terrorism people brought us here and handed us over to the peshmergas, and they'll take us to a camp. We will see what happens," he said.Amal Mohammed, a 20-year-old Sunni Kurd, is sitting in the back.

She has thrown back the black face veil the jihadists made her wear after they "appeared in one day" in the village of Topzawa, near Mosul.

"They controlled our lives completely: we had to wear the niqab, the abaya (full veil and a long black robe)," she said.