700,000 could swamp shelter meant for 60,000

The military operation to wrest Mosul from Isis could potentially become the single largest, most complex humanitarian operation in the world in 2016, a UN official said.

Speaking via video-link from Iraq, Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, said that in the worst case scenario, one million civilians could flee the city with 700,000 of them requiring shelter — overwhelming emergency sites that currently only have the capacity to hold 60,000 people.

“Our capacity to support 700,000 people in the shortterm — we couldn’t do it. And certainly if we had to mount a response over the intermediate-term, if they couldn’t go back to Mosul quickly, if there was too much damage in the city, then it would test us to the breaking point,” Grande said.

She said that the UN was especially concerned about the safety of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million civilians inside Mosul who may get caught in the fighting. She said officials were also concerned that Isis had already booby trapped parts of Mosul and positioned snipers within the city.

“In the worst case scenario, we can’t rule out the possibility that there may be a chemical weapons attack. We also fear that Isis, as they did in Fallujah, may try and hold civilian populations either as human shields or forcibly expel huge numbers of civilians in the face of an attack by the Iraqi security forces knowing the Iraqi forces will not fire on their own people.”

Largely due to a lack of funding from the international community, the UN and its partners have only set up six emergency sites with a capacity to hold some 60,000 people. But Grande said in the next few weeks 22 emergency sites should be in place with a capacity to hold over 400,000 people — far short of the 700,000 people who could potentially flood out of the city. — AP