IRBIL, Iraq — For three years, he worked closely with U.S. forces in Iraq. Now Ammar Younes sits in his frigid tent in a camp in Iraq’s Kurdish region, using a scalpel to gouge pieces of shrapnel out of his mangled legs as his young children look on.
A trainer in the Iraqi army, the 34-year-old was wounded when Islamic State extremists placed a bomb under his car in Mosul in June, just a week before the northern city fell to the militants. He was forced to flee his hospital bed, still wearing his medical gown, when the city was overrun.
Younes is one of more than 2 million Iraqis uprooted this year by the advance of the Islamic State, an exodus that has compounded this country’s massive displacement crisis.
About 1.7 million Iraqis fled their homes for other parts of the country from 2006 to 2008, the worst days of sectarian conflict after the U.S. -led invasion of 2003. Most have yet to return to their homes. Meanwhile, the war in neighboring Syria has spawned more than 3.2 million refugees, some of whom have sought shelter in Iraq.
The speed and scale of the latest Iraq crisis have stunned communities, international humanitarian organizations and the Iraqi government, which is poorly equipped to help displaced people as it fights a war against Islamist militants and struggles to balance its books amid diving oil prices. Adding to the misery of the displaced, the winter has set in, sending temperatures below freezing.
Almost half of the Iraqis fleeing their communities this year have crowded into Iraqi Kurdistan, already home to more than 200,000 Syrian refugees.
With resources scarce, a scramble for survival is underway. The displaced say their sects, ethnicities and whether they have crossed an international border and legally qualify as refugees can determine their level of access to the scant aid available.
Younes has spent more than $2,000 on surgeries to remove shrapnel from his legs. But he said that he’s struggling to afford further care and that free clinics lack the specialized treatment he needs.
He complained that his plight is made worse by his being a Sunni Arab, like the Islamic State fighters, and thus deemed a security risk. He said he sometimes finds it difficult to get permission to leave the camp, even for medical treatment.
“We are at the bottom of the pile,” he said. “We are blamed for helping the terrorists, but we are the ones who have suffered most from them.”
Younes said he had been injured five times by extremists, including once when he was shot as he drove to work on a U.S. Army base, where he was a trainer for Iraqi officers. He said he never considered applying for a visa to go to the United States and still does not want to leave his country.
Sunni Arabs’ plight
Some of the displaced cannot make it into the semiautonomous Kurdish region. Aid agencies say the Kurdish authorities have tightened entry, particularly for Sunni Arabs, since a suicide bombing killed five people in Irbil last month, a rare event in that part of Iraq. Kurdish officials claim the borders are open.
As Yazidi refugees driven out of their homes by Islamic State militants prepare for colder temperatures, aid agencies are struggling to provide for the displaced. (Reuters)
Those fleeing Mosul say checkpoints run by the Iraqi army or Shiite militias near Baghdad and Shiite provinces of the south also turn them away, leaving them with nowhere to run.
A Sunni Arab medical student from Mosul, who declined to give his name out of concern for his safety, spoke of fleeing the city this month only to be turned away at a checkpoint controlled by Kurdish peshmerga security forces near the city of Kirkuk. He decided to return home, despite fearing that he would be targeted by Islamic State militants for having left.
In some ways, Younes is one of the lucky ones, able to find a space on the edge of Irbil in a United Nations-administered camp that is home to 3,100 displaced people. Still, even there, the camp management was scrambling in mid-December to finish preparations for winter — distributing kerosene and extra plastic sheeting.
Loveday Morris is a Beirut-based correspondent for The Post. She has previously covered the Middle East for The National, based in Abu Dhabi, and for the Independent, based in London and Beirut.
