840,000 remain displaced outside Mosul – UN

UN migration agency on Friday said in Geneva that 839,118 individuals remain displaced following heavy fighting to retake the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

International Organisation for Migration (IOM) staff working around Mosul said “thousands of people remain buried under the rubble.

“This was due to the liberation of the northern Iraq city from the Islamic State (IS) forces by the country’s government forces,’’ the agency senior press officer Joel Millman said at a UN media briefing.

Mosul lies 400 km north of Iraq’s capital Baghdad, and until this month had been under IS control since June 2014, when government forces abandoned their weapons and fled, enabling IS militants to take control.

IOM said much of what was once a bustling city of more than 1.4 million people, whose history dates back to at least 401 BC, is just stones and rubble after Iraqi forces seized it back earlier this month.

The liberation of Mosul has shifted the fight across the border to Syria about 470 km westward towards Raqqa where IS has its headquarters in northern Syria.

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It is also the place where the UN agencies are battling to help the displaced people.

Jens Laerke, Deputy spokesperson for Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said the Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Ursula Mueller, previously expressed concern for the protection of about 200,000 people displaced in Raqqa governorate since April 1.

OCHA is the UN Secretariat Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Laerke said about 30,000 of them were displaced from their homes in this month alone due to the military operations against IS forces.

He said UN and humanitarian partners are responding to those who have been displaced and are ready to provide support in Raqqa city itself, as soon as access and security conditions allow.

“Humanitarian deliveries to besieged and hard-to-reach areas are currently at a low point. No UN-coordinated inter-agency convoys have reached any besieged areas in July although airdrops to Deir Ez Zour [south of Raqqa] have continued,” Laerke said.