Iraqis flee Mosul fighting, only to arrive in ‘terrible’ camps that are ill-equipped and overflowing

Camps for displaced civilians in Iraq’s north are overflowing as Iraqi forces push toward the Islamic State group-held city of Mosul, forcing thousands to flee.

Just southeast of Mosul, the Dibaga camp for Iraqis displaced from Nineveh province is steadily expanding. In the camp’s centre, crowds of angry young men swarm administrative offices demanding proper shelter or permission to leave the camp entirely. In one section separated from the rest of the camp, families call through chain link fences in search of loved ones partitioned by a lengthy interrogation process.

As many as 3,000 people have arrived here in just the last week, according to the camp’s administration. The more than 28,000 people living here are sheltering in a patchwork of tents, prefab containers, makeshift shelters and municipal buildings, or just sleeping out in the open.

As the first stages of the operation to retake Mosul from IS progresses, up to a million more people are expected to be forced from their homes by violence, according to the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross. But local officials and aid groups are already struggling to cope with the current, much smaller-scale influx.

Poor planning and limited resources during the operation to push IS out of Fallujah this summer left tens of thousands of civilians stuck in the Anbar Province desert with no shelter and little food and water. As Iraq’s military slowly pushes up toward Mosul from the recently secured Qayyarah airbase west of the Tigris River, Iraqi commanders say they are trying to mitigate the humanitarian fallout by encouraging some families not to flee.

“The situation for the displaced inside the camps is terrible,” said Iraqi army Colonel Faris Bashir al-Dulaimy of the Nineveh operations command in Makhmour. “Our forces are having more people staying inside their houses as we advance,” he said explaining that there isn’t sufficient infrastructure to accommodate repeated large influxes of people in need of aid.