Mosul operation to test UN humanitarian efforts
The military operation to wrest Mosul from the Islamic State group could potentially become the single largest, most complex humanitarian operation in the world in 2016, a U.N. official said Monday.
Speaking via video-link from Iraq, Lise Grande, the U.N. humanitarian co-ordinator for Iraq, said that in the worst case scenario, some 1 million civilians could flee the city with 700,000 of them requiring shelter — overwhelming emergency sites that currently only have the capacity to hold 60,000 people.
“Our capacity to support 700,000 people in the short-term — we couldn’t do it. And certainly if we had to mount a response over the intermediate-term, if they couldn’t go back to Mosul quickly, if there was too much damage in the city, then it would test us to the breaking point,” Grande said.
She said that the U.N. was especially concerned about the safety of the estimated 1.2 to 1.5 million civilians inside Mosul who may get caught in the fighting. She said officials were also concerned that IS had already booby trapped parts of Mosul and positioned snipers within the city.