‘IT IS A SITUATION OF: WHO DO YOU TRUST?’ AUTHORITIES IN REFUGEE CAMPS STAY ON THE LOOKOUT FOR ISIL SYMPATHIZERS AND COLLABORATORS WHO MAY BE HIDING AMONG THEM.
Shouting “Allahu akbar,” Mustafa ran out of his family’s tent brandishing a frighteningly real-looking toy rifle.
The boy, who looked as if he could not have been more than five, was dressed entirely in black, the preferred uniform of jihadists with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Mustafa’s posturing attracted astonishingly little attention from the thousands of other internally displaced Iraqis who had ended up in one of a network of hastily erected UN IDP camps halfway between besieged Mosul and the Kurdistan Regional Government’s capital in Erbil. But the Kurds and the Iraqi government are deeply concerned about where the refugees’ loyalties truly lie.
Although Mustafa’s mother denied he had come under ISIL’s spell during the 27 months the family lived under its often murderous interpretation of Sharia law, it was hard to come up with any other explanation.
A Kurd who had served in the special forces who spoke briefly with the boy and then with his mother said he believed her when she claimed foreign fighters with ISIL, including Russians, were congregating in the northeast of Mosul, but he was skeptical of her claims of how she and her husband cursed and feared ISIL and “would show them no mercy.” Nor did he accept her story about how the family had made a harrowing overnight journey out of Mosul the first chance it had.
Mustafa had “been brainwashed,” determined the ex-soldier, who did not want his name used because of the nature of his current work.
Suspicions about who belongs to ISIL or is somehow under its spell run high among security officials closely following developments in the vast UN tent camps that dominate the rolling Kurdish landscape and in the liberated towns where those who somehow make it out of besieged Mosul first show up.
Ian MacKay, a nurse from Squamish, B.C., with the Christian humanitarian aid organization, Samaritan’s Purse, said it was impossible not to be aware that ISIL infiltrators might be in their midst.
“There is a lot of firepower hanging around in this lineup,” the 26-year-old said as he and a team of doctors and nurses provided medical care to a large group of Iraqis who had just arrived in the town of Khidr Elias from Mosul. “Tension would be a good way to describe it, for sure.”
As bombs dropped by Iraqi and coalition warplanes could be heard exploding nearby, MacKay, who has also worked in Haiti, Liberia, Congo and the Philippines, said, “You know that every time one of them goes off lives are being taken.”
Many of those seeking food, water and shelter are clearly hungry and haunted; plenty of others look well fed and seem untroubled by what they experienced under ISIL’s self-proclaimed caliphate.
Even if it is unlikely there are active terrorists in the camps, authorities worry about the infiltration of collaborators or sympathizers trying to access parts of Iraq controlled by the government or by the Kurds as a way to reach ISIL’s last redoubt in neighbouring Raqqa.
As big a concern as this is for authorities here and for Western governments reeling from a series of ISIL-inspired terrorist attacks in Europe, the bigger concern is the massive humanitarian crisis created by events in Mosul. UN agencies and non-governmental organizations have had to scramble to figure out how to care for a fresh exodus of 100,000 homeless people. They are also preparing to assist the half million or more Iraqis still trapped under bomb, rocket, missile and sniper fire in Mosul.
As he dispensed medicine and provided quick medical assessments based on what interpreters said they had been told, MacKay surveyed the mostly male crowd, who waited for several hours before being frisked and allowed through to the clinic and food distribution centre that had been set up in the middle of a street.
“It is a situation of: ‘Who do you trust?’ I am sure some of these people do have ugly pasts and have committed some pretty horrible crimes,” MacKay said. “I am not here to judge but to provide health care to the people. That is what I go by.”