Nearly 150,000 left homeless in Iraq's battle for Mosul

The massive Iraqi military operation to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State group has made more than 148,000 people homeless.

Just over the past week itself, nearly 12,500 people have been forced to flee their homes, the United Nations revealed.

In a statement released on Monday night, the UN said the fighting over Iraq's second-largest city continues to inflict relatively high civilian casualties, with more than 1,500 wounded taken hospitals in the nearby city of Irbil for trauma care.

IS fighters have repeatedly targeted civilians trying to flee neighbourhoods still under militant control.

Nearly half of casualties in Iraq's battle for Mosul are civilians, more than triple the number expected.

Some 47 percent of the victims of the three-month war against the Islamic State group have been Iraqis caught in the crossfire, the UN estimated.

The figure comes as around 750,000 remain trapped in the western part of the city, still under IS control.

You would expect in a conflict like this that the number of civilian casualties would be around 15 percent, a high of 20 percent.

"What we're seeing in Mosul is that nearly 50 percent of all casualties are in fact civilians," said Lise Grande, the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.

When the military operation to uproot the extremist group from northern Iraq began on October 17, 1.5 million civilians were living in Mosul. In the eastern part of the city, where Iraqi forces say they have liberated 80 percent of the area, some 400,000 civilians must no longer tolerate the IS group.

Agencies contributed to this report