Fallujah refugees trapped in desert camps
unfolding in the displacement camps around the city.
The situation has been grim for Fallujah’s residents since the battle to wrest control of the city from Isil began last month. The terror group had prevented civilians from leaving, but its retreat from several neighbourhoods opened up vital exit routes, and the trickle of civilians fleeing the fighting turned into an exodus.
An estimated 30,000 people made the dangerous journey out last week, joining the tens of thousands of displaced persons living in makeshift camps in the desert. An internal UN report puts the total number displaced by the fighting in Fallujah at 83,000.
The conditions in the camps are dire. Everything is in short supply: food, water, lavatories, medicine, tents.
“There is no water here, and we haven’t showered since we arrived five days ago. We have not received any food,” says a young woman in one of the camps clustered around Amiriyat al-Fallujah, to the south of the contested city.
The woman, who like most of the civilians in the camps does not want to give her name, says her family has been forced to live on watermelons, the only food they are able to afford with the little money they have.
Alongside several other families, they are camped out in unfinished containers known as caravans, which have a roof and floor but no walls to protect them from the daily sandstorms that batter the camps.
“Every day they tell us they will give us a caravan, but it never happens,” the woman told the
In the barren desert, temperatures easily surpass 40 degrees in June, and the thermometer needle is guaranteed to rise further as the summer progresses. In these conditions, even the healthy struggle. For the old and the they can be a death sentence.
Twenty, mostly elderly, refugees have already died from exhaustion, Anbar’s provincial council said last week.
The few aid agencies present are sending desperate pleas for help. “People in the camps are collapsing, they are in a really bad state. People are going to die because they are exposed to the elements and the searing heat,” says Karl Schembri, spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Offically, the Iraqi government runs the camps, but beyond the guards at the entrance, there is little sign of a government presence. Instead, trucks occasionally pull up to dispense food and water, donated by private individuals appalled by the suffering.
Aid agencies are beginning to make their presence felt, but privately they complain about the bureaucratic intransigence that is holding up access to Anbar province from nearby Baghdad and delaying visas for key staff.
As a result, the suffering of the people of Fallujah continues. Many of the displaced say they were surviving on dates they picked from the palm trees growing in their garden.
Isil rule had become increasingly brutal, while the city was pounded from the air and by artillery fire. Civilians in the camps bear badly treated wounds – the result of coalition air strikes – which continue to fester as medical provision remains scarce.
“It was misery under Isis [Isil], and it infirm, is misery here,” another women sitting in an unfinished caravan sums up the mood in the camp.
Unable to return to Fallujah, where the Iraqi army is still clearing the heavily destroyed city of the final pockets of Isil resistance, the displaced are prevented from escaping the squalid desert camps by entering Baghdad.
On Bzeibiz bridge, the guards turn away civilians trying to cross into the lush farmland on the other side and make their way into Baghdad. Iraq’s Shia-dominated government and security forces are mistrustful of Fallujah’s Sunni population, which they suspect harbours Isil sympathies.
Without a guarantor vouching for them, residents of Anbar province are not allowed to pass through, and the Euphrates has become an internal border preventing Iraqis from seeking refuge in their capital.
Many of the civilians camped out under the tin roofs have been waiting for days, some for weeks. They brandish medical referrals to hospitals in Baghdad in the hope that the police will let them pass, but their pleas are met with demands for bribes they cannot afford to pay.
In the camps, the absence of men is notable. All male residents of fighting age that fled Fallujah or its outlying districts were immediately detained by the army, units of the federal police or Shia militia groups that act as an auxiliary force.
Most of these men are still missing. Those who return often bear the marks of torture. Allegations of human rights abuses surfaced soon after the Shia militia began detaining men from the area surrounding Fallujah.
Six hundred men taken in the township of Saqlawiyah by the militias were returned badly beaten, their body bearing the signs of “rape, burns, knife cuts, and bruising from beatings” said a Human Rights Watch report. There is also credible evidence that the militia summarily executed civilians, says HRW.
The Shia militia deny committing abuses. But other men from Saqlawiyah have still not been released. An internal UN report puts the number of missing from the township alone at above 850.