The United Nations refugee agency yesterday revealed it
would launch a major aid operation to get supplies to more than half a million
people displaced by fighting in northern Iraq.
A four-day airlift of tents and other aid will begin today
to the Kurdish city of Irbil in northern Iraq from Aqaba in Jordan, followed by
road convoys from Turkey and Jordan and sea shipments from Dubai via Iran over
the next ten days, said UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards.
“This is a very, very significant aid push and certainly one
of the largest I can recall in quite a while,” he told a news briefing in
Geneva. “This is a major humanitarian crisis and disaster. It continues to
affect many people.”
The UNHCR estimates that 1.2 million have fled their homes
across Iraq this year.
About 200,000 have settled in Iraq’s Kurdistan region since
August when the city of Sinjar and neighbouring areas were seized by Islamic
State (IS) militants, said the UNHCR.
At least 11,000 from the Yazidi minority have taken shelter
inside Iraq’s war-torn neighbour Syria, and about 300 more were crossing the
Peshkabour border every day, the UNHCR said.
“The fact you see people fleeing via Syria to safety speaks
to how desperate the situation is, particularly in Sinjar in the last few
days,” said Mr Edwards.
The initial aid shipments will contain 3,300 tents and
20,000 plastic sheets for shelter, 18,500 kitchen sets and 16,500 jerry cans,
he added. The aid effort is backed by Saudi Arabia, the UK, the United States
and other donors.
The UN’s World Food Programme said it has already served
more than a million meals to displaced people in the past two weeks.
Over the weekend, the UN agency for children, Unicef,
stepped up aid efforts for minority Yazidi refugees in northern Iraq.
Unicef representative Marzio Babille said it was one of the
largest humanitarian responses he had seen in 50 years.
In Dohuk, 80,000 refugees had arrived in only ten days,
fleeing from IS fighters.
The major aid operation comes as western powers step up
efforts to stem the IS advance by supporting Kurdish and Iraqi government
forces.
US president Barack Obama said IS militants were “a threat
to all Iraqis and the entire region”. Earlier this week Mr Obama said the Mosul
Dam in northern Iraq had been recaptured by Kurdish forces from IS fighters.
Mr Obama said the US helped in the operation with air
strikes targeting IS positions around the dam, Iraq’s largest.
He said the move was a “major step forward”, and the US had
begun a long-term strategy to defeat the militants, including the building of a
humanitarian “international coalition” in response to the refugee crisis.
The statement followed Iraqi claims the dam had been “fully
cleansed”, but IS said it was still in control.
Recapturing the dam has been a key focus of the last few
days as warnings came of catastrophic ramifications if the dam were to fail
under IS militants unequipped to carry out essential maintenance work.
According to US assessments the dam has the potential to
cause severe flooding in Mosul, and possibly even affect areas as far south as
Baghdad.
A short distance to the south-west of the dam, gunfire and
explosives have been sending smoke into the sky as Kurdish forces try to push
their front lines further into the low hills nearby, said Mr Obama.
US bombers, fighter jets and drones carried out 25 air
strikes at the weekend and 15 on Monday to help Kurdish and Iraqi forces on the
ground secure the Mosul dam.
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