Civilians suffer extreme hunger in Mosul battle
MOSUL, Iraq — Aliyah Hussein and the 25 family members sheltering with her in Mosul’s western Mahatta neighborhood survive by picking wild greens growing in a park near their home. Hussein mixes the vegetables with small amounts of rice and tomato paste to make a thin soup that is often her family’s only meal.
Her cousin Zuhair Abdul Karim said even with the wild greens, the food ran out on a recent day.
“I swear to God, we are hungry. (The Islamic State group) made us hungry. They didn’t leave anything for us, they even stole our food,” Hussein said. Her home sits just a few hundred yards from the front line in the battle for western Mosul.
As Iraqi forces continue to make slow progress in the fight against Islamic State in the city, clawing back territory house by house and block by block, food supplies are running dangerously low for civilians trapped inside militant-held territory and those inside recently retaken neighborhoods.
Although Hussein has technically been liberated, her neighborhood is still too dangerous for most humanitarian groups to reach. In the past week she said she received only one box of food consisting of rice, oil and tomato paste, barely enough to feed her entire family even for a single day.
“The women didn’t have lunch. Only the children and men have eaten,” Abdul Karim said, explaining that he and his family are now living meal to meal. “We don’t know if we’ll have dinner.”
Some families walk several miles to markets that have sprung up in neighborhoods that have been under Iraqi military control longer. But prices there are high. Most families have exhausted their savings and work is almost non-existent in Mosul, a city now ripped apart by war.
“The humanitarian world needs to realize that there is a huge gap between people who are in the safe zone and people who are actually trapped in the no man’s land,” said Alto Labetubun with Norwegian People Aid, one of the few groups operating in neighborhoods close to the front line.
Some 300,000 to 500,000 people remain beyond anyone’s reach, trapped in militant-held Mosul neighborhoods, according to the United Nations. Most are estimated to be in Mosul’s old city, where the final battles of the operation are expected to play out. If the fighting there lasts many more weeks, the U.N. warns the consequences for civilians will be “catastrophic.”