As bullets fly in Mosul, the rural roads leading west are choked with traffic – much of which is believed to be ISIS fighters fleeing to the terrorist army’s Syrian stronghold some 275 miles away in Raqqa.
(FOX)- On a late morning this week, FoxNews.com observed through binoculars and from atop Shengal Mountain, also known as Sinjar, hundreds of cars crawling along dusty roads linking Iraq and Syria. To Kurdish military intelligence officials, the cause of the congestion was clear.
“I haven’t seen anything like this. They are running away massively,” a Kurdish military intelligence source told FoxNews.com, even as he spoke by phone to an ISIS informant traversing the distant road.
“Ten minutes ago, the airstrikes hit a bomb factory in Bulayj,” the official repeated. “ISIS fighters came to Bulayj and arrested all the tribal sheiks and accused them of spying. Families are both willingly and being forced to go to Raqqa.”
ISIS loyalists and victims alike appear to be using every means possible to flee, making the trip in pickup trucks, tractor-trailers and small vehicles.
When the exodus was still a trickle earlier in the week, ISIS sought to hide the escape route by burning tires along the roadside. But as FoxNews.com watched, only the dust from dirt roads provided scant cover in the distance as the convoys chugged westward.
The terror army’s escape now depends on a different sort of cover.
“ISIS often has many different things they do to block vision,” another Peshmerga officer said. “But even so, we can’t attack them [when they are] loading cars with kids and women. How could we attack kids? They have no part in this fight.”
Similarly, the U.S.-led coalition won’t unleash airpower with civilians in harm’s way, giving ISIS — and likely its leadership — free passage to its Syrian base.
“ISIS is moving more and more of its families to Raqqa, they are kicking civilians out of their homes and occupying them,” one source connected to Iraqi Forces intelligence explained. “Then, only the men return to Mosul to keep fighting.”