For en gang skyld er der penge nok til at bistå ofre og fordrevne, da Saudi Arabien har åbnet pengetanken, men folk i felten siger, at hjælpen er usynlig og ikke-eksisterende – og nedkastning fra luften har f.eks. blot ført til knuste vanddunke på den stenede jord.
DUBAI, 15 August 2014 (IRIN): Tens of thousands of Iraqis have yet to receive aid despite funding pouring into relief efforts, according to NGOs.
Security concerns due to advances by Islamist militants and logistical hold-ups have prevented much of the funding – including a 500 million US dollar (2,75 mia. DKR) donation from Saudi Arabia – from reaching those most in need.
On 12 August, the UN declared Iraq a Level Three Emergency – its highest emergency classification.
More than 1.2 million people have fled their homes since January following a surge by jihadist militants now referring to themselves as the Islamic State (formerly ISIS). Hundreds of thousands are in desperate need of shelter, food, water and medical care.
500 million dollar from Saudi Arabia
The international response has been significant: On 1 July, Saudi Arabia announced it would send 500 million dollar to the UN, while US and UK helicopters have been air-dropping food, water and other basic supplies to thousands of people fleeing from ISIS and stranded on a mountain.
The Saudi grant, among others, means that, unusually for a humanitarian crisis, the UN has received more funding than it had requested.
Yet the scale and unpredictability of the emergency has left the humanitarian community struggling to keep up, with Amnesty International this week criticizing relief efforts.
“The international response to large-scale displacement of civilians from areas seized by ISIS has been woefully inadequate to date,” Amnesty said in a statement.
It added that the much-publicized airdrops had been largely ineffective because water bottles and other items smashed on impact with the ground.
Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, told IRIN:
“Where I have been in recent days, the aid response has been nearly invisible. Organizations need to explain why they have not been there on the ground delivering on a larger scale.”
A mammoth undertaking
Part of the problem is the rapid rise of ISIS, which has targeted ethnic minorities and is perceived to be deeply hostile to aid workers, making large swathes of the country inaccessible for NGOs.
In June the group overcame the Iraqi security forces to seize the cities of Mosul and Tikrit, prompting several hundred thousand people to flee.
Most travelled northwards to the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, which, in contrast to the rest of Iraq, has been largely calm since the 2003 US-led invasion.
According to the latest figures, there are over 500,000 displaced Iraqis inside Kurdistan, the majority either in tented camps, collective shelters like schools and mosques, or sleeping in parks and unfinished buildings.
The region, which was already hosting 220,000 Syrian refugees before this latest influx, is severely over-stretched, partly because of a dispute between Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which has not received its 2014 budget allocation from central government.
Housing space is also at a premium
When IRIN spoke to Jacqueline Badcock, the UN deputy special representative in Iraq in late July, she said overcrowding was so bad that agencies were seeking to establish camps outside Kurdish territory but in areas protected by the Peshmerga (Iraqi Kurdistan’s armed forces).
Yet the ISIS advance has made such plans impossible in the short-term.
In recent weeks, even Kurdistan has been threatened, as the militants have crept to within a few kilometres of the border, breaking through lines of Peshmerga fighters.
Deep-rooted fear of the militants – fleeing to new places
This has led to some camps being abandoned.
More than 5,000 displaced who were in Khazair camp, next to one of the main border crossings between Iraq and Kurdistan, and several thousand from Garwama Camp in Dohuk, fled their tents on 8 August after the Peshmerga said they could not guarantee their protection from the advancing militants.
The UN has admitted that the changing dynamics of the crisis have made it difficult to keep abreast of the situation.
“This is a very complex and violent conflict, and a very highly fluid and rapidly changing emergency which is testing the capacity of the UN,” explained Brendan McDonald, acting head of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Iraq.
“There are new as well as secondary and tertiary displacements happening every single day throughout the country…. [and] the UN, NGOs and partners are mobilizing resources and ramping up, but the pace of the emergency has so far outstripped our capabilities, despite best efforts.”
Beyond Kurdistan
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http://www.irinnews.org/report/100494/iraq-aid-response-inadequate-despite-funding-boost
