Mr. Arango, the Times Baghdad bureau chief, is reporting from villages and humanitarian aid camps near Mosul.
JADAA, Iraq — The first thing Musar Abid did when he escaped the Islamic State this week was grab a razor.
“I shaved this morning,” he said, smiling and pointing to his cheeks, smooth for the first time since jihadist enforcers began requiring long beards two years ago. “I became a young man again.”
When Iraqi federal policemen taking part in the offensive to reclaim Mosulfrom the terrorist group approached his village, Mr. Abid, 41, was elated to see them coming.
For Mr. Abid, escape was an imperative — he had informed to the Iraqi police about conditions in the city, he said. “All of the world knows what life was like under Daesh,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL.
But there are a million or more other civilians still in the city, and as they begin taking up the decision of whether to flee or stay, they face increasing hazards. Aid groups and international agencies are racing to prepare the possibility that the trickle of civilians fleeing Mosul, like Mr. Abid, will soon become a flood.
Aid workers fear that as the fight moves to urban centers, it could force the sudden displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and they are stockpiling gas masks in case the Islamic State turns to chemical attacks. And despite the relief civilians are expressing as they flee the jihadists, the risk is considerable.
The government has been dropping leaflets, telling civilians to stay in their homes and urging young men to rise up and fight the militants once security forces approach.
As of Friday, with the fighting still on the city’s outskirts, most Mosul residents appeared to be hunkering down, American officials said. If that trend holds, they said, it could lessen the crunch on supplies and housing at the aid camps outside the city.
But the dilemma for civilians in Mosul will only grow more acute as fighting intensifies: stay, and risk having their families caught up in combat and airstrikes or held as hostages by the Islamic State; or go, and risk sniper attacks and roadside bombs as they flee, followed by a bleak life in camps for displaced people for the foreseeable future.
Families and aid workers worry that the Islamic State will use civilians as human shields, as they did earlier this year in the fight for Falluja. The United Nations on Friday said the group was holding 550 families as shields near Mosul.
Many of the displaced so far — 5,640 people in the first days of fighting, the United Nations said — are from villages south of Mosul, in a region where the Iraqi Army and the federal police are pushing north from a rear staging base in Qaiyara, where American soldiers are advising the Iraqis.
To get there, New York Times journalists drove south this week from Erbil, along cratered roads whose only traffic seemed to be flatbed trucks carrying military vehicles and pickup trucks full of government fighters. On the horizon the parched moonscape met a wall of black smoke from the oil wells the Islamic State has set ablaze as a cover from airstrikes. Checkpoints, flying the flags of the Kurdish pesh merga, the Iraqi Army or a revered Shiite martyr, lined the road.
At the base in Qaiyara, a group of federal policeman grabbed their rifles, and we piled into their minivan for a tour of some of the villages. As we drove through the dusty towns, children waved and cheered, and the policemen tossed them water bottles.
At one stop, as a dust storm kicked up, an older man, Hussein Ali Abdella, living in a tent, said he had no idea when he could return home because of tribal disputes between groups that supported the Islamic State and those that were against.
As we left, a 15-year-old boy named Othman Falah told us, “That man you were just talking to, all his sons were with Daesh.”
The exchange was just one small sign of the challenges of reconciliation in Iraq even if the Islamic State can be driven out. A broad political arrangement between the Shiite-led government and the Sunni minority will be necessary for lasting peace, but so will reconciliation between Sunnis at the grass-roots level across the territories like these villages where the Islamic State has ruled.
As Iraqi forces have advanced this week, their progress has been slowed by suicide attacks and roadside bombs. Western diplomats and foreign leaders have warned that the fight for Mosul could be long and bloody, perhaps stretching into next year.
Some Iraqis from Mosul and the surrounding area, though, are predicting another scenario: that the residents of Mosul have become so disenchanted by the group’s brutal rule that at least some will rise up against the Islamic State.
“Believe me, if they attack Mosul all the youth will be with the Iraqi Army,” said Umm Yihya, 46, who escaped Mosul about a week ago with her son and is now living in a sprawling tent encampment in Debaga, south of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region. “Even the women will fight against Daesh. They’ve treated us in a disgraceful way, and that generated a lot of hate against them.”
Others said a broad civilian uprising against the Islamic State was unlikely. “They are afraid,” said Hussein Hassan, a man in his mid-70s who fled his village this week. “I can’t say they will rise up.”
While most civilians, he said, would welcome liberation, they have little confidence in the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. In his village, he said, just a handful of militants on motorbikes fought off a much larger force. “They were engaging all of the Iraqi forces, and the army couldn’t get in our village,” he said.
The Islamic State, meanwhile, is trying to shape perceptions in advance of the main assault on the city. The group released videos this week showing masked fighters patrolling the streets, and interviews with residents claiming that life was fine inside the city.
But residents inside the city, as well as people displaced from Mosul who are in contact with relatives there, painted a different picture in interviews this week. They said the streets were mostly empty, with fighters having either fled or moved to the front lines to defend outer villages from the approaching security forces.
They spoke of growing fear as the city’s jihadist rulers clamped down on residents. Food is running scarce, and being caught using a cellphone to communicate with the outside world can bring severe punishment, even execution. Some civilians described frantically deleting from their phones photographs they had taken of themselves with Islamic State fighters, fearing they could be tarred as collaborators by the advancing security forces.
Inside Mosul, militants have also been trying to stoke the sectarian fears of the Sunni Arab population, gathering residents this week to watch propaganda videos showing Shiites — who dominated the Iraqi security forces — abusing Sunnis, residents said.
About a month before the Mosul offensive began, Ahtan Thamir, in his 20s, escaped the city. Like Mr. Abid, he shaved his beard when he reached a camp. He said he was regularly in touch with friends and family in Mosul and that everyone was “waiting for this moment.”
The militants, he predicted, “will be like dogs: They will run away.”
