After fleeing homes, Iraqis near Mosul wait for tents

HAMAM AL ALIL, Iraq- A sea of tents stretches to the horizon at a camp for displaced near Mosul but Ahmed Hassan says he and 17 relatives have to sleep outside because there is no room.

Tens of thousands of civilians have poured into camps set up around Mosul, as Iraqi forces battle to retake the city from the Daesh terror group militants

“It’s a nightmare. No camp will take us in. They’re all full,” says Hassan, a short man in his fifties who wears a traditional headdress and a grey coat over his white robe.

Instead, Hassan, two cousins and their families — 18 people in all — have set up camp with other displaced Iraqis inside the concrete shell of an unfinished building just outside a camp in the Hamam Al Alil area.

White and blue tarpaulin sheets stretch between the building’s naked columns to block the battering wind. Clothes are hung to dry.

Women and children wearing dirty pyjamas sit on dusty blankets on the ground, surrounded by their meagre possessions: a few chickens, sacks of rice and bottles of water.

“We don’t know where to go. It’s cold here. Children and women are in the street,” says Hassan, who fled fighting in the Badush area northwest of Mosul.

Aid groups working in the nearby camp have brought him and his family food, blankets and grey mattresses. 

But, says his neighbour Abdullah Khidr, tents have run out.

“We eat well here, but there are so many displaced people — so many — that there are no more tents,” says the man in his sixties who also fled Badush.

Khidr, his wife and their seven children were escaping fighting for the second time after fleeing west Mosul just three months before.

Iraqi forces launched an assault to retake Mosul from Daesh in October, more than two years after the militants took control of the northern city, Iraq’s second largest.

‘Lost dreams’ 

After recapturing the east of Mosul, Iraqi forces last month set their sites on the west, where hundreds of thousands of civilians remain trapped.

More than 68,000 people have fled west Mosul since February 25, streaming to camps around the city, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

“We have not got to that stage yet where there is no capacity whatsoever in the camps,” says Hala Jaber, IOM spokeswoman for the Mosul crisis, who says there are 17 camps in Nineveh province, of which Mosul is the capital.

“Large numbers of people are arriving on a daily basis,” she says. “Some procedural checks needed to be undertaken by the government before people are moved. Things may be getting slightly backlogged and people ending up staying more than a day or two.”

 Melany Markham, spokeswoman for the Norwegian Refugee Council, which recently took over the management of Hamam Al Alil, says an extension to the site is planned in coming weeks.

“There will be room for around 30,000 people with about 4,000 tents,” she says.

Behind her, a stream of buses ferries in hundreds more displaced Iraqis, who wait for someone to look after them in a vast muddy area outside the camp.

Omar Ahmed, 22, is among the lucky ones to have made it inside.

“There are four or five families per tent. Men sleep outside while women and children are inside,” he says.

When Daesh overran Mosul in mid-2014, Ahmed still had a year left of secondary school, shattering his hopes of heading to university to become a teacher.

“Before we could have dreams. Now they’re lost,” he says.

Rain gushes down on the Hamam Al Alil camp, transforming its alleyways into slushy swamps.

In one, three children in their pyjamas try to clean their muddy plastic sandals by dipping them in a puddle.