Mosul’s displaced at Debaga, a transit camp to nowhere

The roads are full of stones and the air is full of dust. It is a desolate place, Debaga, row upon row of dusty blue and white domes. But from a hill above the camp, near an old graveyard, I can see a girl skipping rope between the tents and a group of children playing in a circle, splashes of colour and motion in a still life.

At the camp entrance, a member of Kurdish security, the Asayish, passes us through. “Open Sesame,” he says with a grin, and a boy swings open the gate to a ­cacophony of sound and a confusion of emotions: families lugging layers of mattresses and blankets down the main road; a small girl sitting alone drawing circles in the dust; a line of men queuing silently for food; women rushing for a distribution of new clothes; a boy who floats among it all blowing bubbles in the air.

Debaga, south of Mosul, was built 18 months ago to house 30,000 internally displaced people fleeing conflict in northern Iraq. Already, there are more than that and as the battle for Mosul intensifies and ground and villages are reclaimed from the control of Islamic State, a small but steady stream arrives each day, often with just the clothes on their backs, faces creased with exhaustion and uncertainty.

In the main road of the camp, where men and women are separated and placed in temporary transition centres, from which they no longer transition because there is nowhere for them to go, a man called Assad, 65, from a village south of Mosul, tells of how he fled last week with his wife and children and relatives: 16 people crammed into three cars. It was “a very huge risk” to run, he says.

“We ran away in the night,” he says. “We thought that Daesh (Islamic State) would not catch us, but they paid attention and were shooting on us. Some of the bullets hit the cars but we survived.”

Searching for the Kurdish Peshmerga front lines, they lose their way and drive into a minefield. “We got near the safe side, but landmines struck two of the cars and three of my children were injured. Not badly. After that we were in the river for two hours until we came to the safe side.”

Asked about life under Islamic State, he says, “It was a life full of violence, it wasn’t a life. We didn’t have school, we didn’t have work. My children are well-educated and were planning to go university. But ISIS were taking all the young men and recruiting them — and killing them if they refused. We just wanted safety for our children, and education.

“Life in Mosul is full of violence. We couldn’t take it any more. They killed any man who even tried to smoke. Any man who tried to shave his beard, they killed them. They tortured all the young men if they didn’t obey their rules. I got terrified. My family as well. Two of my children were beaten up very badly because they smoked a cigarette. The place was full of violence and tragedy.”

In a women’s section of the camp, a woman called Iklas sits with her legs crossed on a thin rubber mattress watching the comings and goings. Her youngest daughter, Teeba, three, is draped across her knee, in a deep sleep. Her other children drift in and out as she talks about how they fled two days earlier from the village of Al-Shirqat, when ISIS turned the sky black with sulphur fires.

There were 11 of them: Iklas; her husband, Omar; their five children; Omar’s brother, sister, father and mother. Before they fled, she says, people told them it would take seven hours to walk to the safe side of the front lines. It took them 10 hours and for four of them the group had no water. For two hours, Omar carried his mother on his back.

Asked about living conditions at Debaga, she spreads her hands in a gesture that says what can you do? “It is not good, but this poor condition is much better than the situation we had in my town. Life under Daesh was very terrible.” Asked about her hopes, she says: “I don’t see any hope for the future. All our homes will be burned and destroyed.”

For months before the Mosul offensive began on October 17, ­humanitarian agencies, already consumed by Syria’s five-year war, had been warning that Mosul shaped as the next humanitarian crisis, and that more than a million people could be affected, in a country where more than 3.3 million people have already fled their homes since January 2014.

As of Wednesday, according to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about 10,500 people had been displaced by the ­operation to retake Mosul. Seven camps have been established to house 60,000 people and by year’s end there will be 11 camps for up to 120,000 people.

But aid agencies are concerned that Iraq is underprepared and that military success in Mosul could be a humanitarian disaster, as hundreds of thousands of people are expected to flee the city in all directions, including to Syria. There are also concerns that Mosul might not fall so quickly as Iraq’s military leaders suggest and could become another Aleppo — the Syrian city large parts of which have been reduced to rubble since the Battle of Aleppo started in 2012. And winter is coming.

At a new camp, Zelikan, 30km north of Mosul, a group of 50 children play the game Duck, Duck, Goose. It is the most wonderful game I have ever seen. When it ends, the children run to get pens and paper and books, including children’s poems from ­Damascus and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. A group of older boys play soccer. World Vision staff running this “child friendly space” say there has been enormous change in the children in the four days since they arrived from the northern outskirts of Mosul.

A few hundred displaced people have arrived here in the past few days, the first trickle of what is expected to become several thousand people camped in the shadow and snow of Bashiqa Mountain. White lines on the stony ground show where the new tents will go.

World Vision children and youth emergency specialist Persiana Kumberaj, an Albanian who has worked in South Sudan and Kosovo, cries as she talks about the children when they arrived.

“They had forgotten how to play,” she says, tears rolling down her cheeks. “For me, it is very sad to know that a child doesn’t know what it means to play because playing games and having fun is what they should do and they never had that opportunity.”

Some are wounded more deeply than others. A five-year-old boy, Ahmed, has barely spoken since he arrived, after witnessing the death of his 12-year-old brother as they ran from ISIS.

A young psychologist working with him, Hogir Naif Abdullah, says the boy is deeply traumatised. “By the end of the first day, he could just say his name, nothing more,” he says.

Another boy, Mustafa, 12, refuses to join the other children. “He doesn’t accept what has happened,” Abdullah says. “It is bigger than his mind.”

In a tent at Zelikan, a man called Mohamad, 37, talks about the day he fled with his wife, Shaima, and their six children, when his village on the northern outskirts of Mosul became a battleground between ISIS and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

The fighting began early in the morning and lasted into the night when ISIS came to his house and told him to get out so that they could use it to fight. All the people of the village were gathered ­together in one house: 140 people. They stayed there until 2am, until an explosion ripped through the house, killing a woman and child.

“After that, the children were really scared,” he says. “We separated. Some of the families stayed in the house and some of us went to the Peshmerga. I told my family, ‘We are like the dead, let’s see what happens.’ When we came out of the village we were terrified. ISIS was shooting at us from afar, but Peshmerga was also fighting them, so we could survive and get to the other side.”

Asked about life under ISIS, he says that it was “stress every moment”. Sitting alongside me, her face uncovered, as most of the faces of women are in these displaced camps, Shaima says that for her ISIS meant never being able to leave the house, and being covered head to toe in a burka, even when she milked the sheep beside the house. She says she feels “comfortable” now.

At the centre of the storm is Mosul, an ancient city cut off from the world: first, after ISIS swept across northern and central Iraq in 2014 and two months later extended its control to surrounding villages and towns, and now as an international coalition bound together only by its determination to destroy ISIS tightens the noose and does not speak much of who will rule Mosul after the liberation.

Within Mosul, conditions continue to deteriorate, according to reports claiming to come from within the city. Since the offensive began, Mosul Eye, a blog set up “to communicate what’s happening in Mosul to the rest of the world, minute by minute, from an independent historian inside Mosul”, has described the scenes within the city, in short, sharp observations.

“Finally, the day to liberate Mosul is here,” the writer said on October 18. The following day, there was “an uneasy quietness in the city” and reports that an industrial district, Wadi Eqab, had been closed off by ISIS and turned into “a manufacturing facility for bombs, car bombs, and IEDs”. The writer describes detention camps filled with prisoners, areas where Yazidi female captives are believed to be held, roads and walkways booby-trapped, power supplies turned off for hours at a time, prisoner executions. The humanitarian situation was “dire”, fear and uncertainty everywhere.

On October 20, the writer describes a grim atmosphere: “ISIL (Islamic State) is planning to bomb most of the remaining buildings in Mosul … We learned that ISIL is spreading car bombs over the city … The signs of the battles are strongly felt in the city ... Fear and anxiety are prominent at the ­moment. Many are getting ready to flee the city once the battles start in Mosul … Calm and quietness are about to be over in Mosul ...”

Consistent with later reports that ISIS is sending “suicide squads” from Syria to Mosul, the writer tells of foreign jihadists ­appearing in the city, food shortages, surveillance aircraft flying constantly overhead. “Children and teens are the majority of ISIL fighters,” the blog says. “They are aged between 15 and 18 years old. We feel that ISIL is intending to fight a huge battle in Mosul, and there are no signs of it backing up, withdrawing, or fear ...

“People are trying to leave the city at any cost. Many are ready to flee at any moment the battles approach the city. Their biggest fear is to be caught between ISIL fire and the liberating forces’ fire.”

Last Sunday, the writer said ISIS’s last stronghold in Iraq was hovering “between existence and extinction”.

On Wednesday: “Today, Mosul has entered the atmosphere of the war. The bombardment is continuous on many areas of the city … Many civilian casualties were reported due to the bombing … ISIL has booby-trapped all bridges in Mosul with explosives … ISIL executed 23 prisoners this morning … We believe that there are prisoners held inside Ibn Sina and Al-Jamhouri hospitals. Several Yazidi girls are among the captives … ISIL members are spread on the streets, in cars equipped with heavy armament. Most of those fighters are teenagers. There is no building left standing in Mosul. What was not targeted by the coalition, ISIL bombed it. The fires at Almishraq sulfur field sent a clear message to the Mosulis: ISIL will not spare the city and its inhabitants for its defence. ISIL gave a very clear message this morning, ‘Who is not with us is against us’, said one of the ISIL leaders at Bab Altob. ISIL tells people through mosques that the liberating forces is here to kill the Mosulis and to ‘enslave’ their women. People fear this war and the uncertainty of it and what happens after it very much …”

Stuart Rintoul is a former senior writer with The Australian, now working with aid agency World Vision.

• First names only have been used for fear of reprisals.