HASSAN SHAM CAMP, Iraq: UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called on the international community to increase aid to help people fleeing the Iraqi city of Mosul, which government forces have been battling to retake from Daesh.
Iraqi forces have seized back most of the country’s second-largest city from the hard-line group in a massive six-month campaign.
But at least 355,000 residents have fled fighting, according to the government, and some 400,000 civilians remain trapped inside the densely populated Old City where street battles have raged for weeks.
“We don’t have the resources necessary to support these people,” Guterres told reporters during a visit to the Hassan Sham Camp, one of several centers outside Mosul packed with civilians escaping the fighting.
The UN and Iraqi authorities have been building more camps but struggle to accommodate new arrivals with two families sometimes having to share one tent.
“Unfortunately our program is only 8 percent funded,” he said, referring to a 2017 UN humanitarian response program without giving additional details.
During his visit, which lasted about half an hour, residents complained to Guterres about the quality of drinking water and poor living conditions in tents frequented by mice and insects.
“We want to go back to our villages. We are fed up,” said Saqr Younes, who fled to Mosul when Daesh arrived in his village in 2014.
“If we had died by bombardment it would have been more merciful,” said Younes, who has been in the camp for four months.
Many of the displaced have returned to their homes in areas retaken from Daesh but some, like Younes, have not yet been allowed to return by the authorities.
The US-led coalition said that it had killed a propaganda chief and associates in an airstrike in the western Iraqi town of Al-Qaim.
Ibrahim Al-Ansari was an “important ISIS (Daesh) leader,” said Col. Joseph Scrocca, a spokesman for the Baghdad-based coalition.
The official was a leader in propaganda efforts to recruit foreign fighters and encourage “terror attacks” in Western countries, Scrocca told reporters.
The airstrike took place on March 25, he said.
The bombardment, which also killed four other Daesh fighters, destroyed a multimedia operation team, said a Defense Department official.
Their propaganda efforts included “brainwashing of young children to perpetuate brutal ISIS (Daesh) methods,” the source said.
The remote town of Al-Qaim is in the Euphrates Valley, on the border with Syria.
According to the Pentagon, the Euphrates Valley could become the last bastion of Daesh following the fall of its strongholds in Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.