IRAQI FAMILIES FLEEING MOSUL GATHER MONDAY AS FORCES PREPARE TO OUST ISIL FROM THE CITY. THE UNITED NATIONS IS PREPARING TO RECEIVE 150,000 MOSUL REFUGEES.
IMAM GHARBI, IRAQ • The woman said that her husband was an Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighter but that she left him after trying, in vain, to persuade to him to defect. Last week, she took their six children and fled across the battle lines toward ground controlled by the Iraqi army, she said.
But as the woman spoke in a camp for newly displaced people south of Mosul — watched by men with guns, with no electricity or food in her tent and her children playing in dirt — her escape seemed like the prelude to another miserable ordeal.
The camp sat next to her village, but she was not allowed to go home, pending an interrogation by Iraqi officials into her past and the activities of her husband, whom she claimed not to have seen in months. Even if she were eventually granted permission to leave, it was not clear there would be a place for her in the village — or, for that matter, in Iraq.
Thousands of people who lived for the past two years under the rule of the militants have begun to escape their villages as a huge Iraqi force closes in on the northern city of Mosul in its second week of the offensive to retake the city.
Most, though, are Sunni Muslims, unable to celebrate just yet as they face questions from the authorities and the country at large about their years living alongside the Sunni militants, as well as any ties to the jihadists, whether real or just perceived.
Men and boys have sometimes faced months of screening, with human rights groups also reporting incidents of execution, torture and arbitrary arrest by the country’s array of militias and security forces.
Those with family members who joined ISIL, such as the woman, who gave only her first name, Khowla, face a different kind of reckoning — often barred from returning to their villages by local officials, tribal authorities or vengeful neighbours.
A few tents away, a 40-year-old driver named Ali, who fled his village late last week, said some sort of violent reckoning was inevitable. “In the beginning, there will be revenge. But then it will be better,” he said.
In another camp, east of Mosul, dozens of young men who had fled areas in and around the city were kept behind a padlocked gate, sequestered from families who moved freely in other parts of the camp. Some had been there for 40 days without any indication of when they would be allowed to leave, they said.
“We fled a prison for another prison,” said Mohamed Asad, who sat with a group of young men in a tent.