REMEMBER Mosul? Not that long ago our television news bulletins and newspaper reports almost daily featured harrowing accounts of the battle to liberate Iraq’s second largest city from two years of rule by the jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) group. The perceived wisdom among many was that capturing the city and depriving IS of its capital in its self-proclaimed caliphate would mark the beginning of its end.

Eight months on from the start of that offensive,however, the diehards among the extremists continue to put up fierce resistance in west Mosul and every day the casualty rate among innocent civilians mounts horribly and inexorably.

Those television pictures and photojournalism that have emerged of late are difficult to look at. Only yesterday video footage appeared on social media of terrified residents fleeing along a street as IS gunmen tried to pick them off likes ducks in a shooting gallery.

A few weeks ago other footage, some of it taken by drones, showed the bodies of more than 160 men, women and children lying dead and wounded around the perimeter of an industrial plant after they too tried to flee the fighting that was slowly engulfing their neighbourhoods.

In one report, pictures of the massacre’s aftermath, captured by a CNN crew, showed a little girl no more than three years old, peering out from under the black hijab of a women surrounded by the bodies of some 30 others. All had been lying there in the line of IS fire for two days, with the little girl hiding against her mother’s corpse. Only after a tank was moved into position and covering fire laid down was one man able to sprint the short distance to pick up the now-screaming little girl who was unwilling to let her mother go.

The man who rescued her was an ex-US Army Special Forces soldier turned humanitarian worker whose incredible act of bravery saved a little girl whose name is unknown and who was so traumatised she has not since said a word.

Time and again over the last eight months, those of us covering the battle for Mosul have witnessed such suffering. Recently I listened as a young couple, Salim and Shaima, told of their struggle to live under IS rule with their seven-month old son Abdu Rahman, before they were lucky enough to slip the net of snipers and landmines. Like countless others what they had undergone pushed them to near breaking point. What they felt, Salim, said was more than fear, it was a terror inside them that made their waking hours a living hell.

There was no single worst moment he told me, but rather that their entire lives had become one long bad moment, and only the existence of their tiny son gave them the inspiration to hang on and continue. “We are always thinking about what happened both when awake and in our nightmares when sleeping,” admits Salim. “We cannot wipe out the sight of all those we saw killed in front of own eyes.”

Most of us who have witnessed the military offensive to retake Mosul knew it would get worse before it got better. But bad as it has been, we could scarcely have imagined the situation as it is now.

Children have been especially vulnerable. According to reports received by the UN, families have been shut inside booby-trapped homes and children been deliberately targeted by snipers. It’s estimated by Unicef, the United Nations’ children’s fund, that perhaps as many as 100,000 boys and girls remains trapped in what it calls “extremely dangerous conditions” inside Mosul, with IS attempting to use many as human shields.

All these children’s lives are on the line. Most are experiencing and witnessing terrible violence and atrocities that no human being should ever witness. In some cases, they have been forced to participate in the fighting and violence. The damaging long-term effect of this doesn’t bear thinking about. One Iraqi Kurdish aid worker I spoke with a few months ago at a camp for those displaced from Mosul, told of how he came across some youngsters playing one day. Three boys had made a mud outline of a figure on the ground on which one boy was acting out the execution of the figure, IS-style, with a pretend knife and crying “Allahu Akbar” – God is Great.

This he said was no rare case, and many of the children who have witnessed such horrors in real time during years of IS rule, are now in desperate need of psychological counselling and support.

A staggering 700,000 people have now been forced from their homes in Mosul and the UN warns that another 200,000 may yet still be pushed out. The UN has asked for some $985m to handle its humanitarian response for the city alone, of which only about one-third has been funded.

Lise Grand, the UN humanitarian co-coordinator for Iraq, recently summed up the urgency of the situation stressing, “hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake.

“The military battle in Mosul isn’t over yet and even when it is, the emergency will continue for months,” she warned

Military offensives to recapture cities from a fanatical dug-in enemy are always perilous, but the campaign to free Mosul from IS has seen the use of no-quarter tactics and a humanitarian crisis the likes of which has rarely unfolded since the Second World War.

As the CNN reporter who captured the images of that little traumatised girl rightly says, there are few blueprints for this war. Rarely has anyone fought an enemy like IS holding civilians hostage in this type of a dense urban battlefield. What is happening in the city right now is a hell most of us cannot begin to imagine.

Amidst the distraction of an election here at home and the horrors of terrorism and disaster that have tragically befallen places like Manchester and London of late, it’s all too easy to forget the traumatic events inflicted on others far away.

This though is not the time to turn our backs on the terrible suffering of Mosul’s citizens. They need our humanitarian support more than ever.