Med op mod 1 mio. drevet på flugt siden nytår, står Irak og verden over for en enorm udfordring. Men hos FNs hjælpeorganisationer er kassen stort set tom, selvom de længe har advaret om netop denne situation – og bedt om midler til at håndtere den.
DUBAI, 12 June 2014 (IRIN): Cash-strapped aid agencies are scrambling to respond to an escalating humanitarian crisis after Islamist militants seized control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, forcing an estimated half a million people to flee towards the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in the space of days.
This surge by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – a jihadist grouping also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) because it is active across the border in Syria – comes after a bloody six months in Iraq where car bombs, suicide attacks and shootings have claimed more than 5,000 lives, prompting some to fear civil war might return.
Clashes between ISIL/ISIS, government security forces and other armed groups in Iraq’s restive Anbar province have displaced more than 440,000 people.
Humanitarian actors, who are already supporting some 220,000 Syrian refugees in Kurdistan, have been warning for months that the violence could spread from Anbar, and that their funding was running dangerously low.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) said it had received varying accounts about how many people have been displaced from Mosul and other violence-hit areas in the last week, but the International Organization for Migration estimated as many as 500,000 had been displaced in just a few days.
Short of funds
In an 11 June report UNAMI noted: “Most of the UN agencies do not have funds to continue to provide life-saving humanitarian assistance,” and called on donors to “provide the necessary funding”.
“Our financial resources have already been spread very thin because of the whole situation in Anbar, and our ongoing support to Syrian Refugees,” Michael Bates, Iraq country director for the Danish Refugee Council, told IRIN.
“For some time we have been pushing donors to get involved because already what we could cover for Anbar was minute in comparison to the needs, but now we are [possibly] looking at a million displaced people. I don’t see where this ends,” he added.
Aram Shakaram, Acting Country Director of Save the Children in Iraq, in a statement said the mass exodus from Mosul was “one of the largest and swiftest mass movements of people in the world in recent memory”, and also called for more funding by the international community.
The representative in Iraq for the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Marzio Babille, noted that his agency’s existing appeal for Iraq was only 16 percent funded and said the Mosul crisis would “greatly increase the need for humanitarian assistance and funding”. He described the situation as “an emergency on top of an emergency in Iraq, coming on the heels of other internal displacements of children and families in Anbar, as well as Syrian refugees in the north”
Aid teams in the area report that several thousand people from Mosul have already entered the Kurdish provinces of Erbil and Dohuk, but most are in long queues on the other side of border, with limited access to food, water and shelteR.
Most of the people in Mosul, 400km north of Baghdad, are Sunni Arabs in a city that lies in the province of Nineveh, which is disputed territory partly controlled by Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
Kurdistan concerns
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