25 June, 2017
IS fighters have blown up al Nouri mosque in Mosul, where the group's leader declared the caliphate, the Iraqi military has said.
The UN children's agency said it has documented a number of cases in which IS fighters killed the children of families trying to escape from neighbourhoods controlled by the militants.
"They are using children as a weapon of war to prevent people from fleeing", said UNICEF's Iraq representative, Peter Hawkins.
"This just highlights how indiscriminate and catastrophic this war is".
On Sunday, Iraqi forces began fresh operations aimed at retaking Mosul's Old City, a densely populated maze of narrow alleys where fighting is usually done house to house.
Global organizations estimate that more than 100,000 civilians, of whom half are children, are trapped in extremely risky conditions in the Old City centre, the last district still under the militants' control in Mosul.
More than 1,000 children have been killed and more than 1,100 wounded or maimed since 2014, when the ultra-hardline militants seized large swathes of Iraq, it said.
Children have also been forced to take part in violence.
On the city's west, entire blocks have been flattened by clashes, airstrikes and artillery fire.
The Ministry of Defence said fighters had detonated explosives inside the structures, destroying the mosque and its iconic leaning minaret. The coalition has enabled the Iraqi Security Forces to reclaim over 47,000 square kilometers of their land from ISIS for the people of Iraq.
Sky News chief correspondent Stuart Ramsay in Erbil, Iraq, said: "We spoke to a senior commander who was on the ground and he said it was an explosion on the ground, not an airstrike".
