MOSUL, Iraq
Iraqi government is imposing a "collective punishment" on the northern province of Nineveh by intentionally cutting off electricity and water in Mosul and surrounding regions, an official from Nineveh's electricity administration said on Monday.
Kamal Hamid claimed that there was no malfunctioning in the main provincial power station's electricity generators.
"The Iraqi government, which pretends that there is malfunctioning in the station, is imposing a collective punishment on the city of Mosul and the whole province by cutting electricity since Sunday morning," Hamid told Anadolu Agency.
He said that the power outage also led to a water cut in the province.
ISIL, which already had control of parts of Syria, has extended its reach into Iraq since June 10, when it seized Iraq's second-largest city Mosul and soon afterwards took near-complete control of the northern Iraqi city of Tikrit."
The group seized large swathes of western Iraq’s Anbar province in January including parts of Fallujah and Ramadi, flashpoints of the U.S.-led war in 2003.
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