UN: 100,000 displaced as Mosul battle lines drawn

The UN refugee agency says more than 100,000 people have been displaced as Iraqi forces clear territory ahead of the critical battle for Daesh-held Mosul — a dire statistic raising concerns that a million more could be displaced from in and around Iraq’s second-largest city as the operation moves forward.

Iraq’s leaders have repeatedly promised that Mosul — which has been in the hands of Daesh militants for more than two years now — will be retaken this year, though US officials have said that timeline is unrealistic.
About 43,000 people have been displaced from the Mosul area since March and 66,600 people from the nearby Shirgat area since June, according to UNHCR statements this week.
Clearing operations in Shirgat, south of Mosul, are seeking to cut supply lines used by the Daesh group to move fighters, equipment and provisions in and out of the Mosul area. Iraqi forces are also slowly clearing villages south of Mosul under close air support from the US-led coalition.
“Some days we receive 500, other days we receive 1,000 (displaced) people,” said Brig. Mahdi Younes, with Iraq’s Kurdish peshmerga forces. “With every small movement of the Iraqi army, there are 1,000 more displaced.”
Stationed at a base in Makhmour, some 25 km from the front lines, his men screen displaced civilians as they escape Daesh-held territory.
From the nearby front line near the liberated Qaraya air base, smoke billowed on the horizon from fires lit by Daesh fighters in an attempt to obstruct airstrikes.
Outside Younes’ air-conditioned office at the base, a handful of families from villages near Mosul waited at a checkpoint to be driven to a nearby camp. Some had walked for hours to reach safety, other walked for days.
The Dibaga camp for the displaced, within Iraq’s Kurdish region south of Mosul, is already overflowing from the influx, and thousands more have been left without shelter.
Families huddling in the shade near a school playground said they arrived with nothing except what they could carry. Thousands have been forced to sleep out in the open for weeks before they are allocated a tent on the camp’s edges. Without enough blankets and mattresses, many said they have resorted to sleeping on flattened cardboard boxes.
In the western Anbar province, where Iraqi forces cleared cities and towns of Daesh earlier this year, more than a million people remain displaced, most of them unable to return home.
Overall in Iraq, more than 3.3 million people have been forced from their homes since Daesh first began growing in strength in early 2014, according to the United Nations.

Source: Arab News