As the U.S. and its Western allies moved to impose new sanctions against the Kremlin in retaliation for what they branded war crimes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russian forces were trying to push deep into Ukraine in the east, but the Ukrainian army was holding them back.

“The fate of our land and of our people is being decided. We know what we are fighting for. And we will do everything to win,” Zelenskyy said.

Ukrainian officials have stepped up calls for civilians to evacuate westward from towns near the front line ahead of the anticipated Russian offensive, and some essential services were being moved away. Local authorities in Sloviansk said postal and pension operations were clearing out and bank branches in town were shutting down.

A Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said it will take Russia as much as a month to regroup for a major push on eastern Ukraine. Almost a quarter of its battalion tactical groups in the country have been rendered “non-combat-effective” and have either withdrawn or merged with other units, the official said.

In the scarred and silent streets of Bucha and other towns around Ukraine’s capital where Russian forces withdrew over the past several days, investigators sought to document what appeared to be widespread killings of civilians. Some had evidently been shot at close range, while others were found with their hands bound or their flesh burned.

At a cemetery in Bucha, workers began to load more than 60 bodies apparently collected over the past day into a grocery shipping truck for transport to a facility for further investigation. A few of the black body bags were not fully closed. A glimpse showed the bloodied face of a young adult. Another revealed a pair of white sneakers.

More bodies were yet to be collected in Bucha, days after the Russian retreat. The Associated Press saw two in a house in a silent neighborhood. From time to time there was the muffled boom of workers clearing the town of mines and other unexploded ordnance.

In Andriivka, a village about 60 kilometers (40 miles) west of Kyiv, two police officers from the nearby town of Makariv came Tuesday to identify a man whose body was in a field beside tank tracks. Officers found 20 bodies in the Makariv area, Capt. Alla Pustova said.

Andriivka residents said the Russians arrived in early March and took locals’ phones. Some people were detained, then released; others met unknown fates. Some described sheltering for weeks in musty, cramped cellars normally used for storing vegetables for winter.

With the sixth week of the war drawing to a close, the soldiers were gone, and Russian armored personnel carriers, a tank and other vehicles sat destroyed on bot

h ends of the road running through the village. Several buildings were reduced to mounds of bricks and corrugated metal. Residents struggled without heat, electricity or cooking gas.

“First we were scared, now we are hysterical,” said Valentyna Klymenko, 64. She said she, her husband and two neighbors weathered the siege by sleeping on stacks of potatoes covered with a mattress and blankets. “We didn’t cry at first. Now we are crying.”

To the north of the village, in the town of Borodyanka, rescue workers combed through the rubble of apartment blocks, looking for bodies. Mine-disposal units worked nearby.

The Kremlin has insisted its troops have committed no war crimes, charging that the images out of Bucha were staged by the Ukrainians.

Thwarted in their efforts to take the capital and forced to withdraw, President Vladimir Putin’s troops, along with mercenaries, are now pouring into the Donbas, Ukraine’s mostly Russian-speaking industrial heartland in the east.

Overnight, Russian forces attacked a fuel depot and a factory in the Dnipropetrovsk region, just west of the Donbas, authorities said. In the Luhansk region, which is part of the Donbas, Russian shelling Wednesday set fire to at least 10 multi-story buildings and a mall in the town of Sievierodonetsk, the regional governor reported. There was no immediate word on deaths or injuries.

Ukrainian forces have been fighting Russia-backed separatists in Luhansk and the other Donbas region, Donetsk, since 2014. Ahead of its Feb. 24 invasion, Moscow recognized the regions as independent states.

Ukrainian authorities have said the bodies of at least 410 civilians have been found in towns around Kyiv, and Associated Press journalists in Bucha counted dozens of corpses in civilian clothes and interviewed Ukrainians who told of witnessing atrocities.

In a video address Tuesday to the U.N. Security Council, Zelenskyy said that civilians had been tortured, shot in the back of the head, thrown down wells, blown up with grenades in their apartments and crushed to death by tanks while in cars.

He said that those who gave the orders and those who carried them out should face war crimes charges in front of a Nuremberg-type tribunal.

In reaction to the alleged atrocities, the U.S. announced sanctions against Putin’s two adult daughters and said it is toughening penalties against Russian banks. Britain banned investment in Russia and pledged to end its dependence on Russian coal and oil by the end of the year.

The European Union was also expected to take additional punitive measures, including an embargo on coal.

Elsewhere in Ukraine, the aid group Doctors without Borders said its staff witnessed an attack Monday on a cancer hospital in a residential district of the southern city of Mykolaiv. The group said it was the third known strike in recent days on a hospital in the port city, whose capture is key to giving Russia control of the Black Sea coast.

It said it had no overall death toll, but its team saw one body.

The group said it also saw numerous small holes in the ground, scattered over a large area, that suggested the use of cluster bombs. Russia has denied using cluster munitions in Ukraine. The use of such weapons against civilians can be a violation of international law.

Attacks on medical facilities are deemed war crimes, and Russia has been accused of striking such sites, including a maternity hospital in the besieged southern port city of Mariupol, which is part of the Donbas and has been the scene of some of the worst suffering of the war.

British defense officials said 160,000 people remained trapped by Russian airstrikes and heavy fighting in that city, without electricity, communication, medicine, heat or water.

A convoy accompanied by the Red Cross has been trying to get into Mariupol since Friday and got within 20 kilometers (12 miles), but the organization said it was too dangerous to enter.

Negotiators from Russia and Ukraine have been discussing ways to end the fighting. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said those talks continue despite the war crime allegations.

Oleksandr Stashevskyi and Cara Anna in Bucha, Ukraine, Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations, Yuras Karmanau in Lviv, Ukraine, and Associated Press journalists around the world contributed to this report.

Now the American soldier and his Afghan translator were together again in Germany shopping for a suit. Abdulhaq Sodais’s future hinges on an asylum hearing in a German court after he was denied a U.S. visa, and U.S. Army Veteran Spencer Sullivan was there to help him prepare.

Together, they watched videos from Sodais’ hometown: The crackle of gunfire, dead bodies being carted off as black smoke billowed. Once U.S. troops withdrew, the fragile government built over years by people like Sodais and Sullivan collapsed in just days.

“I couldn’t stop crying,” Sodais said. “My father said the Taliban were knocking on every single door in Herat looking for guys who worked for the coalition forces.”

Sullivan already lost another translator, Sayed Masoud, who was killed by the Taliban while waiting for a U.S. visa. It’s a scar Sullivan carries deeply, the realization that the U.S. government is capable of the one thing he never believed: betrayal.

Sullivan was determined not to let Sodais, who used smugglers to get to Europe, suffer the same fate.

So he flew from California to Germany to help Sodais pick out something to wear for his Sept. 6 asylum hearing.

In a world of hurt and uncertainty, buying a suit was the one thing Sullivan could control. It offered a small hope of making a difference.

A professional appearance just might convince a judge to help keep Sodais safe and uphold the sacred vow that America was unable to keep.

“I made a promise to him just as America made a promise to him to protect him and save his life,” Sullivan said. “I mean how can you turn your back on that promise? I don’t think the answer is more complicated than that. I think it’s actually very simple.”

Sullivan is among scores of U.S. combat veterans working on their own to rescue the Afghans who served alongside them.

Their efforts started long before this month’s chaotic rush to evacuate Afghans after the Taliban’s swift takeover of Afghanistan as U.S. forces withdraw from America’s forever war.

Thousands of Afghans who aided US troops have spent years stuck in a backlogged and beleaguered U.S. Special Immigrant Visa program, while frantic messages of the Taliban hunting them down have been pinging the phones of the American soldiers they helped on the battlefield.

The program was meant to award Afghans for their support by giving them and their families a pathway to the United States. But it has fallen far short, with Congress failing to approve enough visas each year, while the former Trump administration added new security requirements and bureaucratic hurdles that turned the average wait time from a few months into nearly three years.

Others have been denied over what immigration attorneys say were minor or unjust discrepancies in their performance records. Many now fear that the time they were marked as late to work, unfairly or accidentally even, may cost them their escape, and possibly their life.

Sodais and Masoud stood out among the dozen interpreters who worked with the platoon Sullivan led in Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013.

Both interpreters went with his platoon on dozens of missions into villages controlled by the Taliban, taking on fire while unarmed.

In 2013, Masoud applied for a special immigrant visa after receiving death threats for his work. His application included a letter of recommendation from Sullivan who described him as “punctual and professional, an exemplary linguist and trustworthy friend.”

“Granting him a special immigration visa is the least that can be done in order to express America’s gratitude for his services,” Sullivan wrote.

Two years later, Masoud’s application was denied. The U.S. embassy said he had not worked for the U.S. government or its military. In fact, Masoud was hired by a U.S. firm that had a contract with the Department of Defense to provide linguistic services to troops in Afghanistan.

Masoud appealed and Sullivan wrote another letter to the Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy, Kabul, providing more details of his work, but he got no response.

Sullivan reached out to other veterans to see what he could do. He learned he could pay $20,000 to get Masoud smuggled out, but he didn’t want to support a criminal network. Instead, he hoped the U.S. government would come through on its end.

Meanwhile, Masoud’s texts to Sullivan became more sporadic as the threats escalated, forcing him to move from house to house.

“He was becoming increasingly frantic and afraid,” Sullivan said.

Sullivan got the last one in the summer of 2017.

“Hello sir. I am so sorry to reply you late. I got a problem,” Masoud wrote, apologizing for not keeping in better touch with his friend.

“Hey Sayed it’s OK!” Sullivan texted back. “Are you safe?”

Sullivan never got a reply.

Weeks later, Masoud’s brother answered an email Sullivan sent to Masoud’s account: Masoud had been shot by the Taliban after returning home for a relative’s funeral and was dead.

Sullivan was consumed by sadness and guilt. He felt partly responsible since he had posted Facebook pictures of them and wondered if he had put his friend at risk. He wondered, too, if he could have done more to protect him.

“I felt helpless,” he said. “I didn’t know what else I could have done. Maybe I should have spent the $20,000 to pay seedy smugglers.”

A year and 1/2 after his death, Sullivan got an email from the U.S. embassy in Kabul informing him that the Afghanistan Special Immigrant Visa Unit had received his recommendation letter for Masoud.

The official wanted to know if the letter was legitimate and if Sullivan would still recommend the applicant so they could begin the process. It included a photo of Masoud with his thick red hair and thin moustache.

Sullivan wrote back to the embassy to inform them that Masoud had been killed while waiting more than four years for his application to be processed.

After Masoud’s death, Sullivan texted Sodais to tell him what had happened to his fellow translator. But he got no reply.

Like Masoud, Sodais also had applied for a special immigrant visa in 2013 and was denied. He applied again in 2015 and 2016. Sullivan sent the U.S. embassy in Kabul letters to support his case.

His last rejection came in 2017. After Sodais’ uncle was beheaded, and his neighbor, who worked as a fuel truck driver for coalition forces, was gunned down by the Taliban while standing in his front doorway, Sodais, who taught himself English using library books because he admired America and believed in its mission, decided he had to find another way out.

His plan would be to go to Europe by land. His brother, who knew someone in a travel agency, helped him get a tourist visa to Iran, and his family knew an Afghan man living there who would end up connecting Sodais to the first of a long line of smugglers.

Sodais left with a backpack full of clothes, and $100 worth of Iranian rials.

Along the way, he met other Afghans who worked for coalition forces also now turning to smugglers to find safe refuge.

Sodais was crammed into cars with refugees stacked on top of each on the floors. They hiked through the mountains in a snowstorm at night and dodged gunfire from Turkish border guards. He was beaten and abandoned by smugglers and jailed and beaten by police.

Meanwhile, his family back in Afghanistan was forced to move because of the Taliban’s growing presence in the area, and urged him to get to safety. He decided to head to Germany since Turkey and Greece were deporting Afghans at the time. His family sold their small general store in Afghanistan to fund his journey.

In the end, it took him seven months and would cost his family $15,000 to get to Germany. Once there, he applied for asylum but was lacking sufficient photos or documentation to support his claims and was immediately denied.

He called Sullivan, who he had not spoken to in more than a year.

“I was like ‘oh my God, he’s alive!’” Sullivan recounted, feeling overjoyed.

Four months later, Sullivan went to see him in Germany and offered to help his case.

Sullivan wrote a transcript for the German court. He sent him photos of his time with his platoon and wrote to the U.S. government to get his record, which showed his contract was terminated in 2013 due to “job abandonment.”

Sodais says he overextended his 30-day leave after going home to deal with a back injury from the blast of an improvised explosive device during a mission.

He was rehired in 2014 by the U.S. military but his contract was administered by a civilian contractor who terminated it in 2016 due to poor job performance.

Sullivan contacted the civilian defense contractor who fired Sodais in 2016 to ask what happened since he had found his work exemplary, but she refused to help him or provide an explanation. The paperwork she signed stated only that he was being released due to “incompatible skill set with the unit’s mission.”

She also would not answer questions about whether she remembered Sodais or had a security concern when contacted by The Associated Press.

Sodais said she falsely accused him of checking his personal Facebook page on the job.

Sodais fell into a deep depression after two years of waiting for a decision by the German courts. The fear of being deported was overwhelming, and he suffered headaches, back aches and other ailments from injuries from the IED blast.

In March of 2020, he tried to end his life, overdosing on pain medication. He spent nearly two months in a psychiatric ward after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.

When he got out, he messaged Sullivan.

“I’m alive right now because of Spencer, because of him,” Sodais said later.

Sullivan said he’s just keeping the promise he made on the battlefield. He is helping Sodais write a book to shed light on the experience of Afghan refugees.

For now, Sodais is safe. On Aug. 11, Germany temporarily halted the deportation of all Afghans due to the upheaval but did not specify how long the order would last.

“Germany is filling our moral void,” Sullivan said of the U.S. government’s failure to help.

But Sodais worries his luck will run out once deportations resume.

“Really sometimes, it’s really hard for me to fight against this life,” he said on a Zoom call with Sullivan as he rattled off his fears over what’s happening in Afghanistan, his guilt over not being able to save his family there, and his anxiety over whether he will ever have a future.

And how will he ever get to the United States, where he wants to live? he asks.

Sullivan interrupts, stopping his downward spiral, and reminds him to stay focused on the Sept. 6 asylum hearing.

“Step one is we keep you alive,” he said. “We get you asylum in Germany and everything else will follow.”

Sullivan had to stay focused, too. Sodais was the one U.S. ally he felt he could possibly save. Days later, he would get an email from Masoud’s brother, who worked for a U.S. military base, pleading for help. He included photos of his mother and uncle who were recently killed.

Sullivan knew there was little he could do since they had never worked together.

At the suit store in Bremen, on Sullivan’s second visit, Sodais exited the dressing room in a black suit.

“Nice! Do a spin,” Sullivan joked, twirling his finger and patting his friend on back as they look in mirror. “You’re looking sharp.”

Sodais chuckled.

It is a moment of lightness after talking about what they’ve been through and what’s to come.

Before Sullivan leaves, Sodais breaks down, and Sullivan embraces him as he sobs.

“It’s OK,” Sullivan says. “You’re going to make it.”

The nearly five-year war that has devastated cities and towns across north Syria and Iraq ended in Baghouz, a minor border village where the cornered militants made their last stand, under a grueling siege for weeks.

On Saturday, the Syrian Democratic Forces raised their bright yellow banner from a shell-pocked house where the militants once flew their notorious black flag. Below it stretched a field shattered by the battle, pitted by trenches and bomb craters and littered with scorched tents, twisted wreckage of burned out vehicles, unspent explosives and few remaining corpses.

“Baghouz is free and the military victory against Daesh has been achieved,” tweeted Mustafa Bali, a spokesman for the Kurdish-led SDF, referring to ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

The fall of Baghouz brings to a close a nearly 5-year global campaign against the Islamic State group that raged in two countries, spanned two U.S. presidencies and saw a U.S.-led coalition unleash more than 100,000 strikes. The campaign has left a trail of destruction in cities in Iraq and Syria, likely killed tens of thousands and drove hundreds of thousands from their homes.

The campaign put an end to the militants’ proto-state, which at its height four years ago was the size of Britain and home to some 8 million people. But the extremist group still maintains a scattered presence and sleeper cells across Syria and Iraq. It’s not known whether the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is still alive or where he might be hiding.

ISIS affiliates in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Afghanistan and other countries continue to pose a threat, and the group’s ideology has inspired so-called lone-wolf attacks that had little if any connection to its leadership.

The “caliphate’s” end also marks a new phase in Syria’s civil war, now in its ninth year. The country is carved up, with the Iranian- and Russian-backed government of President Bashar Assad controlling the west, center and south, the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led forces holding the north and east, and Turkish allies controlling a pocket in the north. The fear now is of new conflict among those players.

At a ceremony held later Saturday at the nearby al-Omar oil field base, a senior U.S. diplomat, William Roebuck, said the territorial defeat of the Islamic State group is a “critical milestone” that delivers a crushing and strategic blow to the extremist group. But he stressed it remains a significant threat.

“We still have much work to do to achieve an enduring defeat of IS,” he said.

The commander in chief of the SDF, Gen. Mazloum Abdi, appealed for continued assistance to his group until the full eradication of the extremist group. He spoke at the ceremony during which fighters marched to a military band.

The victory declaration sets the stage for President Donald Trump to begin withdrawing most of the 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in northern Syria, as he abruptly announced in December that he would do. Trump, however, later agreed to leave a small peacekeeping force of 200 soldiers in Syria to ensure Turkey will not get into a conflict with the SDF. Turkey views Kurdish members of the SDF as terrorists.

The Kurds fear being abandoned by the Americans. They are squeezed between a belligerent Turkey from the north, which regards them as a national threat and Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces from the south.

Saturday’s announcement came a day after Trump declared that Islamic State militants no longer control any territory in Syria, a victory he had been teasing for days.

Associated Press journalists in Baghouz on Saturday, however, reported hearing mortars and gunfire directed toward a cliff overlooking the village, where U.S.-led coalition airstrikes were carried out a day earlier. SDF spokesman Kino Gabriel said Friday there were ISIS fighters hiding in caves near Baghouz and that clearing operations were still underway.

The site of ISIS’s last stand was centered on a tent encampment in Baghouz where, unknown to the besieging SDF forces, thousands of civilians were holed up. During the weeks-long siege, an estimate 30,000 men, women and children were evacuated from the pocket, most of them ISIS family members, a mix of Syrians, Iraqis and foreigners. They were exhausted, hungry, many of them wounded and traumatized by the loss of relatives, but some remained die-hard supporters of the “caliphate.”

On Saturday, journalists were taken to the encampment — a wasteland of wrecked vehicles, torn tents and scorched trees. A few bodies could be seen and a faint smell of rotting corpses hung in the air.

Scattered across the dirt amid empty foxholes and trenches were personal belongings, blankets, generators, oil barrels, water tanks and satellite dishes. Cars and motorcycles were turned to rusted, twisted heaps of metal. There were unused rockets, mortars and grenades, as well as a pile of suicide vests.

Ciya Kobani, an SDF commander, announced the end of the operation from the roof of the building with the SDF flag: “We have been victorious against Daesh,” he declared.

At its height, the Islamic State group ruled a third of both Syria and Iraq, holding millions hostage to its harsh and violent interpretation of Islamic law. The group carried out massacres and documented them with slickly produced videos circulated online. It beheaded foreign journalists and aid workers and burned alive a captured Jordanian pilot. During a rampage through Iraq’s Sinjar region in 2014, it captured thousands of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority and forced them into sexual slavery. Many remain missing to this day.

The group also used its caliphate as a launchpad for attacks around the globe, including the assaults in Paris in 2015 that killed more than 130 people.

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted that “a major danger to our country is now eliminated, yet the threat remains and the fight against terrorist groups must continue.” France has been a member of the coalition fighting the ISIS since 2014.

While it imposed its unforgiving interpretation of Islamic law through public beheadings and crucifixions, the group also carried out the mundane duties of governance in its territories, including regulating prices at markets and repairing infrastructure.

Cornered in Baghouz, the group fought fiercely and desperately to hang on to the last shred of territory it controlled, using thousands of civilians, including women and children, as human shields. In the final weeks, they streamed out of Baghouz, bedraggled, angry and hungry, overwhelming Kurdish-run camps in northern Syria where they are being held.

Aid organizations say more than 100 people have died in the journey from Baghouz to the al-Hol camp in Hassakeh province, or soon after arriving.

Associated Press writer Zeina Karam in Beirut contributed to this report.

The battle to capture the extremist group’s last patch of territory in eastern Syria — a collection of tents covering foxholes and underground tunnels in the village of Baghouz — has dragged on for weeks amid an unexpected exodus of civilians from the area.

The sheer number of people who have emerged from Baghouz, nearly 30,000 since early January according to Kurdish officials, has taken the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces by surprise. Most have been women and children whose existence in a labyrinth of underground caves and tunnels was unknown to the fighters.

In the last two weeks, many fighters appeared to be among those evacuating. But an unknown number of militants and civilians remain inside, refusing to surrender.

“We are facing several difficulties regarding the operations,” SDF commander Kino Gabriel told reporters outside Baghouz on Sunday.

He cited the large number of mines and explosive devices planted by ISIS and the existence of tunnels and hideouts beneath the ground that are being used by the militants to attack SDF forces or defend themselves.

The camp is all that remains of a self-declared Islamic “caliphate” that once sprawled across large parts of Syria and neighboring Iraq. But a declaration of victory and the group’s territorial defeat has been delayed as the military campaign sputtered on in fits and starts.

A final push by Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces started on Jan. 9 but has been paused on several occasions, mainly to allow for civilians to evacuate and fighters to surrender.

Underscoring the struggles faced by the SDF as they try to flush the out extremists, three ISIS fighters emerged from Baghouz on Friday acting as though they wanted to surrender only to blew themselves up, killing six people.

The campaign has also been hindered by bad weather. Intermittent storms have at times turned the battlefield to mud and ISIS militants have mounted counteroffensives on windy days, burning tires and oil to try to force the SDF back with smoke.

On Sunday, dozens of men and women were seen walking around the besieged IS encampment in Baghouz, as SDF fighters watched from a hilltop close by.

The camp, looking much like a junkyard, was littered with damaged vans and pickup trucks parked between tents where people appeared to be moving about.

On the hilltop lookout north of Baghouz, an SDF sentry, lying flat on his stomach with his rocket launcher trained on the camp, cautioned an approaching comrade not to get too close. “There are snipers,” he said of the ISIS camp.

Gabriel said the camp was approximately 0.25 square kilometers in size — much the same area it was five weeks ago, when the SDF said it was finally going to conclude the battle.

In the middle of the camp stands a pair of two-story compounds, showing little sign of damage. Several houses that appeared habitable can be seen as well.

With operations now stretching into the spring, Gabriel faced pointed questions from the press over whether ISIS would be able to resupply itself with water and goods, despite the siege.

He said he was not aware of any smuggling tunnels still in operation, and that ISIS was cut off from the outside world.

“I don’t think we will be seeing more ISIS terrorists appearing in this pocket, he said.

A commander participating in operations on the western side of the enclave said he did not believe ISIS was fleeing to the other side of the Euphrates River either, where Syrian government forces and their allies are holding positions.

Gabriel said 29,600 people have left Baghouz since Jan. 9, among them 5,000 fighters — far greater than the SDF had initially estimated remained inside.

He said the SDF no longer estimates how many people remained in Baghouz but added that recent evacuees told the fighting forces that another 5,000 were still inside.

The force and the Kurdish-led authorities that administer northeast Syria have banned in recent days journalists from interviewing evacuees from Baghouz.

The evacuees are now living in detention-like camps in the self-administered region that international humanitarian organizations say are vastly overcrowded and underserved. They say disease is rampant in the camps and medical care is desperately needed.

“The Daesh terrorists are starting to feel hunger and thirst and we are seeing this in the people who are coming out of the camp,” said Gabriel, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS.

At least one Iraqi soldier was killed and five were wounded in the two separate suicide attacks, the military said. On Sunday, a bomber in women’s clothing killed 14 people at a camp for displaced residents in Anbar province, a provincial official said. No group claimed responsibility for the attack.

“These tactics don’t surprise me,” said Sgt. Ahmed Fadil, who patrolled Mosul’s Old City just 50 meters (yards) from the front.

The militants “have nowhere to go. They’re trapped,” he said.

Monday’s two suicide bombings against Iraqi soldiers followed three other such attacks by women — some of them teenagers — in the previous two days, said Sgt. Ali Abdullah Hussein.

A soldier displayed the school ID card retrieved from the body of one of the bombers, showing her to be only 15. The photo was of serious young woman in a white hijab and indicated she had studied in Bangladesh.

“Most of the people who blew themselves up today are women,” said special forces Lt. Col. Salam Hussein. He added that seven women strapped with explosives approached the troops Monday, “but thank God, our units stopped (them).”

Government troops advancing through the Old City were using rougher tactics to clear the remaining pockets of IS forces.

The tempo of airstrikes was so great Monday that coalition aircraft couldn’t keep up with the requests for air support from Iraqi ground forces. Instead, they sought approval for artillery strikes.

Associated Press drone footage showed the result: dozens of buildings burning in the Old City.

Iraqi Special Forces soldiers enter a house as they continue advancing against Islamic State militants in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Monday, July 3, 2017.

Photo Credit: Felipe Dana/AP

While shops have reopened and civilian traffic fills streets in retaken neighborhoods, thick black smoke continued to rise just a few kilometers away from IS-held territory on the bank of the Tigris River that divides Iraq’s second-largest city. The area controlled by the militants is less than a square kilometer (less than half a square mile).

Islamic State militants swiftly overran Mosul in 2014. The U.S.-backed offensive to retake the city was launched in October and has proceeded slowly, even though Iraqi political and military officials had vowed to declare victory by the end of 2016.

Iraqi forces began their push to retake the Old City in mid-June.

Even though the militants are squeezed into smaller and smaller territory, the danger remains for units like Fadil’s.

When they heard cries from civilians just around the corner, he and his colleagues rushed their commanding officer to safety into a nearby home that already had been cleared. They yelled at the group of sobbing women and children to hurry past.

Fadil explained the reason for their caution.

“They cry and then — boom! They explode themselves,” he said. “The closer we get to victory, the more suicide bombers they will send.”

At one screening point, soldiers anxiously held civilians back at gunpoint, shouting at men and boys to strip to their underwear.

An Iraqi Special Forces soldier stands in position in an alley as Iraqi forces continue their advance against Islamic State militants in the Old City of Mosul, Iraq, Monday, July 3, 2017.

Photo Credit: Felipe Dana/AP

Hussein, of the special forces, and a group of about a dozen men searched on foot Monday for more suicide bombers. An informant pointed out a house occupied by IS fighters.

A soldier kicked in a door, shouted a warning and threw two grenades into the front room. A second soldier stuffed a rag into a plastic jug of gasoline, lit it and threw it inside.

“There are some suicide bombers who refuse to leave the houses, so we’re forced to deal with them with smoke and fire and hand grenades,” Hussein said, noting that the troops burned only the basement, not the house.

His men seized five suspected IS fighters, binding their hands with electrical wire and blindfolding them with scraps of cloth. At least one of the five was arrested.

For most of the soldiers in Mosul, the final days of the grueling battle caps more than three years of fighting the militants.

Hassan Ahmed, a soldier with the special forces deployed in the Old City, said he can’t deny that the war has changed him.

“It’s like I’m heartless — I don’t feel anything,” he said. “But we are still good people. We have mercy.”

Associated Press writer Felipe Dana in Mosul contributed.

Similarly intense counterattacks followed pushes on the other fronts. Federal police Maj. Gen. Haider al-Maturi said his forces pushed through concrete roadblocks and earthen berms set up by the Islamic State group to impede their progress, and succeeded in capturing around 30 percent of the Aviation District, the first district entering Mosul’s western perimeter from the south.

“There were fierce clashes. We faced car bombs, suicide attackers and mortar shelling,” al-Maturi said. “The battle ahead will be difficult and complicated because of the civilians around. It’ll be street fights.”

Al-Maturi said six Iraqi troops were wounded, including two officers. However, an Associated Press team near the front line saw at least four wounded special forces’ members and the bodies of three soldiers, suggesting more intense fighting than the previous day. A Canadian medic volunteering at a front-line clinic said he had treated at least 10 wounded federal policemen. Iraq’s military does not release official casualty figures.

Maj. Gen. Thamer Mohammed, commander of the rapid response unit of the Iraqi federal police, said 65 IS fighters were killed in the battle at the airport.

Earlier on Friday, the spokesman of the Joint Military Operation Command, Brig. Gen. Yahya Rasool, said Iraqi forces had also retaken the military base adjacent to the airport.

An Iraqi air force commander said the airstrikes against IS inside Syria were carried out with F-16 warplanes at dawn and “were successful.” The commander, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said they were conducted at the order of the prime minister.

The advances came a day after special forces joined the fight for western Mosul.

Both the Ghazlani military base and the airport will be key to the next steps in the daunting battle and will serve as a base of operations as Iraqi forces launch subsequent pushes into western Mosul, which is divided by the Tigris River into two halves.

Iraqi authorities declared the city’s eastern half “fully liberated” from the Sunni militants in January, three months after launching the operation to take back Mosul.

On Thursday, Iraqi special forces joined federal police and rapid response units in the push, while the Popular Mobilization Forces — an umbrella group of government-sanctioned Shiite militias — secured the main roads west of Mosul, largely cutting the city off from IS-held territory in Syria.

The United Nations estimate that about 750,000 civilians are trapped in western Mosul. The initial numbers of displaced from western Mosul have been low, but Iraqi forces are yet to punch into the city’s dense urban neighborhoods.

The battle for western Mosul is expected to be the most difficult yet because the sector is denser, with older neighborhoods and narrower streets that will likely complicate the already difficult urban combat ahead.

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Abdul-Zahra contributed from Baghdad.