Millions of Iraqis displaced…

As many as 2 million Iraqi citizens are still refugees in neighbouring countries and at least 1.6 million are classified as internally displaced persons (IDPs). Despite the US occupation forces and Iraqi government claiming that the security situation has “stabilised”, most of the people who fled their homes are too terrified to return.

The ongoing humanitarian crisis was outlined in a report published this month by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which focussed on IDPs. The IOM figure of 1.6 million affected persons is based on information provided by the Iraqi Ministry for Migration and the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), which controls the country’s three northern provinces. It is most likely an underestimate as it only includes those forced from their homes after February 22, 2006—when the bombing of the Shiite Al-Askariya mosque triggered widespread communal violence.

The IOM was able to gather statistics on 221,878 displaced families, made up of 1,331,268 individuals. Of these families, 63.1 percent—some 840,000 people—were forced from their homes in Baghdad. A further 18.6 percent of the total, nearly 250,000 people, fled from the volatile province of Diyala. Most of the remainder were displaced from the provinces of Nineveh (6.1 percent), Salah ad Din (3.3 percent), Kirkuk (3 percent), Anbar (2.7 percent), Basra (1.6 percent) and Babylon (1 percent).
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