Relief groups prepare for massive refugee flow when Mosul battle starts

IRBIL, Iraq — It’s been two years since a blast killed Andreas Khalid Butros’ three neighbors in their village outside Mosul, and two years since the 26-year-old and his pregnant wife fled, taking their two young children and nothing more.

The Christian family now lives at a camp in Ankawa, a suburb of Irbil, in a trailer that serves as a temporary shelter. But when they first came here with hundreds of others fleeing the onslaught of the Islamic State group, there was no camp, and no preparations had been made for their arrival.

That’s a situation relief workers are hoping to avoid as the Iraqi army and its allies prepare to retake Mosul. Those forces are now fighting pockets of militant fighters south of the city, where “the next big fight” will take place, U.S. Army Col. Christopher Garver, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, said Wednesday.

United Nations officials are asking the military to delay the assault so relief workers can prepare for an exodus of a million or more civilians. That will require more time and money to prepare for what some have warned could become a humanitarian crisis that could devastate ongoing relief efforts stretched thin after years of conflict.

“It will be a disaster,” said Matthew Nowery, Iraq country director for the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse. “Everybody agrees [that] all of the plans that are in place are really, really small in light of how big the problem is going to be.”

It’s hard to predict the size of the exodus, but some estimates put it at about 1.5 million, roughly the population of Phoenix. A similar number were displaced in the three months after Mosul fell to the Islamic State group in 2014. Relief efforts then were largely uncoordinated.

At that time, Butros and his family camped out at the Mar Elia Chaldean Catholic Church in Ankawa. They slept on the ground under a palm tree or on sheets tied between shrubs in the churchyard. Their situation gradually improved, and they lived in a tent for a while before making a more permanent home in the trailer.

After an initial chaotic response, the international community poured millions into Iraq to help displaced people like the Butros family, but the needs still outstrip resources. In June, about 85,000 displaced Iraqis fleeing Fallujah strained relief efforts, leaving people sleeping in the open and with little clean drinking water amid rising temperatures. Thousands are still living in the heat and dust on hastily built camps with little shelter from the sun, according to Caroline Gluck, a spokeswoman for the U.N.’s refugee agency.

The fight for Mosul will likely last far longer than the five-week battle for Fallujah, a much smaller city. Militants, estimated at between 2,000 and 10,000, have had two years to dig in, heavily fortifying Iraq’s second-largest city with trenches, tunnels and explosives.

It would be a “fatal flaw” to be caught off guard this time by the flood of desperate civilians, many fleeing on foot, Nowery said.

While some officials believe they may have until October to prepare, others aren’t counting on it.

“It’s happening soon,” said Khalil Sleiman, response manager for the Christian relief organization World Vision International. “When it happens, we will be facing some kind of chaos.”

Roughly half of the 3.3 million Iraqis displaced from their homes and communities since the Islamic State group swept into Iraq in 2014 are children. Pictured here on July 15, 2016, are children living in a camp for displaced families from the city of Qaraqosh, once considered the capital for Iraqi Christians, forced to flee the settlement outside Mosul in August 2014. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

Roughly 560 Iraqis displaced by the advance of the Islamic State group in August 2014 live in a camp on the grounds of Mar Elia Chaldean Catholic Church in Ankawa, a suburb of the Iraqi Kurdish region's capital, Irbil. Pictured here are displaced children and families in the churchyard on July 15, 2016. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

A camp on the property of the Mar Elia Chaldean Catholic Church in Ankawa, a suburb of Irbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish region, pictured here on July 16, 2016, is home to roughly 560 Iraqi Christians, who escaped the advance of the Islamic State on their town of Qaraqosh, outside Mosul, in August 2014. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

This unfinished building near the city of Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq, pictured here on July 22, 2016, houses Iraqis displaced by the advance of the Islamic State group in 2014. Roughly 500,000 of the more than 3.3 million displaced Iraqis live in crude shelters in unfinished buildings, churches, schools and informal camps, according to the International Organization for Migration. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

Ganeet Murad, left, and his brother Kumar, pictured here on July 23, 2016, live in a crude shelter in an unfinished hut on a small playground in the village of Shariya, in the Dahuk province of Iraq's Kurdistan region. The Anbar, Baghdad and Dahuk provinces have the largest shares of the country's 3.3 million people displaced since the Islamic State group swept into Iraq in 2014. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

A grass fire burns in the distance behind a government-run camp near the village of Sharya, in the Dahuk province of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, July 23, 2016. Roughly 500,000 of the 3.3 million Iraqis forced from their homes since 2014 live in government-run camps like this one. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

A family enters a government-run camp near the village of Sharya, in the Dahuk province of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, where more than 17,000 Iraqis, mostly Kurdish Yazidis, live after being displaced by the advance of the Islamic State group in 2014, pictured here on July 23, 2016. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

Seven-year-old Miral and 8-year-old Miriam, pictured here on July 25, 2016, are among the more than 560 Iraqis forced from their homes in the Christian town of Qaraqosh outside Mosul in August 2014. They now live in temporary shelters on the property of the Mar Elia Chaldean Catholic Chruch in Ankawa, a suburb of Irbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish region. (Chad Garland/Stars and Stripes)

International donors have tried to get ahead of the problem, securing pledges of more than $2 billion for humanitarian aid, reconstruction and development at a Washington conference last month, but more is still needed.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter said that leaders at the conference expressed concern that stabilization and reconstruction would lag behind the military operations.

Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, has called for a minimum 2 ½ months and $284 million more to prepare an emergency response to the Mosul campaign. The full humanitarian cost could reach $1.8 billion.

Preparations largely depend on the timing of the assault. A delay would allow for more fundraising and groundwork, Nowery said. It would also mean people would be relocated when temperatures are lower, reducing the amount water needed and easing the logistical burden.

Iraqi and Kurdish authorities are expected to screen the displaced for Islamic State ties before giving them shelter, which Nowery said could leave throngs cordoned off “in the desert,” far from existing resources and supplies.

Aid groups are scrambling to amass and pre-position supplies, and the U.N. is working to establish new displacement camps in the Irbil, Dahuk and northern Ninevah provinces, since existing camps are over capacity.

As even more Iraqis are displaced, Nowery said, the country’s economy will be “strained to a greater extent than it is now.”

Including the displaced, some 10 million Iraqis, more than one in four, depend on some form of humanitarian aid, the U.N. says.

At an informal camp on a tree-shaded playground in a village near Dahuk, Ganeet Murad, 22, has lived in a makeshift hut with his family, ethnic Kurds of the Yazidi religious minority, since they fled the Islamic State’s campaign against Sinjar, some 80 miles from Mosul, two years ago this week.

“We are all out of work here,” Murad said, squatting on the hut’s floor. They rely on government aid — sacks of flour and rice and bottles of cooking oil. “We are poor.”

Nowery, whose organization helps manage the Mar Elia camp, said that many of the displaced in Iraq were middle class or affluent, unlike in the impoverished places he’s done relief work before. They forfeited comfortable homes and professional careers.

Iraqi refugees are among the three largest groups of migrants — the others being Syrians and Afghans — to head to Europe in 2015, when about 1.2 million people arrived in Germany, Sweden and other countries on the Continent. Many others fled to Kurdistan, Iraq’s only autonomous region, located along the northern borders with Turkey and Iran.

Around Kurdistan’s large cities, cranes perch atop concrete rib cages of high-rise apartments, like vultures. Rows of cavernous suburban tract homes stand in various stages of stalled construction. Much of the work halted when oil money began drying up, but some of the arrested developments now house families forced to flee the Islamic State group’s self-proclaimed caliphate.

It’s a vastly different situation than in 2010, when Nowery arrived here to help with the region’s development during what he describes as a relative boom. The country has since suffered the double whammy of the Islamic State’s rise and the collapse of oil prices.

Most displaced Iraqis live in private residences, but roughly a million live in formal camps, like the churchyard or government-run tent cities, or in improvised sites like the Murad family’s playground camp or the unfinished buildings. Hundreds of thousands more have left the country.

It’s not clear when the Iraqis who stayed will be able to return to their interrupted lives. Besides the millions forced from their homes since 2014, 1 million Iraqis are still displaced from conflicts a decade ago.

Murad, a student whose education has been on hold for two years, said he tries to stay busy so he doesn’t have to think about when he’ll be able to return home to Sinjar, which was heavily damaged in the battle to retake it late last year.

Butros hopes to go home when it’s safe, he said, but he has a job in Ankawa and may soon move into a house there. For his youngest son, a toddler sleeping on the floor of their shelter, it could be the first real home he’s ever known.

“He’s 2,” Butros said. “He was born here.”

Evan Kakony contributed to this report.