The Iraqi army said on Saturday that a victory in Mosul was imminent but Daesh fighters vowed to “fight to the death”.

According to Reuters, Iraqi military commanders have said they are close to taking full military control of the city.

However, dozens of Iraqi soldiers reportedly celebrated amid the rubble along the banks of the Tigris rivers, ahead of a formal victory declaration.

But, as Reuters reported, residents, who are mostly living in camps outside the city, were less enthusiastic.

"If there is no rebuilding and people don't return to their homes and regain their belongings, what is the meaning of liberation?" Mohammed Haji Ahmed, 43, a clothing trader, told Reuters in the Hassan Sham camp to the east of Mosul.

This comes after dozens of Daesh fighters were reportedly killed on Saturday and others tried to escape by swimming across Tigris, state TV said.

Reuters reported that Iraqi commanders said the militants were fighting for every meter with snipers, grenades and suicide bombers, forcing security forces to fight house-to-house in the densely populated maze of narrow alleyways.

AFP meanwhile reported that the decaying bodies of Daesh fighters were piling up among the ruins of Mosul.

AFP stated that more than three quarters of the remaining militants in Mosul were foreigners.

"They never surrender," said General Abdel Ghani al-Assadi, a commander in Iraq's elite Counter-Terrorism Service.

"Old Mosul will be their graveyard," he said.

In July 2014, Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi made his only public appearance and called on Muslims worldwide to move to his "caliphate", which he had proclaimed less than a week earlier, straddling Iraq and Syria.

Thousands of foreigners responded to his call.

AFP reported that according to Iraqi police and army commanders, most of the foreign Daesh fighters in Mosul in recent months came from Russia, particularly Chechnya, and other former Soviet bloc countries, as well as various Arab states.

However there were also fighters from Asia - Afghans, Pakistanis, Uighurs from China - as well as Europeans from France, Germany, Belgium and Britain, along with Americans and some north Africans.

According to AFP, when Iraqi forces launched an assault on the Old City on June 18, foreign fighters accounted for only 20 percent of the 1,200 jihadists identified at the time.

But most Iraqi fighters fled by mingling in with the flood of civilians fleeing the Old City.

Army officials told AFP many were arrested, but officers privately estimate that several hundred were able to slip through the cracks.

Officials said however that foreigners would be arrested immediately during exit screening – as they were instantly recognizable because of their poor grasp of Iraqi Arabic.

An Iraqi officer also told AFP: "When we see them, we kill them".