BAGHDAD: The battle to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from jihadists could unleash a massive humanitarian crisis, potentially pushing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes as winter sets in.
Mosul, the country’s second city, was seized by the Islamic State group in 2014, and is now the last major population centre in Iraq still held by the jihadists, who have lost much of the territory they seized two years ago.
The city has a civilian population that numbers in the hundreds of thousands at least, and the only other operation to retake a city that had a significant number of inhabitants — in Fallujah earlier this year — led to widespread displacement and suffering for those who fled.
“We are rushing to help the Iraqis ensure that the bare minimum requirements for a worst-case humanitarian scenario are in place. We’re worried that there is still so much to do and that these are not yet there,” said Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator in Iraq.
“In a worst-case scenario, we’re literally looking at the single largest humanitarian operation in the world in 2016. In Mosul, depending on what happens militarily, a million people could… move in a time span of a couple of weeks.”
If even a sixth of that number of people flee at the same time, it would overwhelm any capacity to help them.
