Welcome to hell
“The screams, the cries, the smells and the stifling heat — this must be hell on earth. Welcome to Amariyat Al Fallujah”
As I entered the tented warehouse, it took me a while to fully grasp what I saw in front of me, says Karl Schembri. Hundreds of bodies crammed on top of each other — some were children trying to sleep, others were elderly people taking deep, agonizing breaths. Others were collapsing of exhaustion in front of me. And a few had injuries from explosives, baring bandages that needed urgent attention.
The screams, the cries, the smells and the stifling heat — this must be hell on earth. Welcome to Amariyat Al Fallujah. It is home to tens of thousands of people who have fled Fallujah, half of them arriving in the last seven days alone.
Iraqi forces launched a military operation a month ago to retake the city from ISIS after more than two years of their brutal rule. For months it has been besieged by the Iraqi forces. Around 50,000 people were trapped inside with little chance of escaping alive.
The midday sun in the Iraqi camps reached close to 50 degrees Celsius, and it will get even higher in July. Elsewhere, in one of the newly opened camps, dozens of women queued for a toilet in the scorching heat.
Some waited in line for five hours under the blazing sun. One single toilet for some 3,000 people, used only by women, stands next to an open pit infested with flies. You cannot imagine the smell — it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Men and children must walk out in the desert to defecate in the open.
The families who escaped thought their nightmare would be over once they reached the displacement camps, just 30 kilometres away. But a new nightmare awaited them as they arrived.
Conditions in the camps are apocalyptic. I’ve been working in humanitarian emergencies in the region for the last seven years — from Yemen, to camps in Lebanon and Jordan, to Palestine. But I’ve never seen anything like this. This is hell on earth.
“It has been five days since we came to the camp,” says Saleh, a father of six. “Women are sleeping on the bare ground here, in the dirt. Where is the shelter? We have no water, only one blanket shared by seven people. Aren’t we Iraqis? Why is this happening to us? Let the UN come and see what has happened to us.”
Another man broke down in front of his children, believing he had led them to worse conditions than what they faced in Fallujah. They spent the last eight days without a tent even though they’re inside the camps.
“We’ve been living like this for the last week exposed to everything, day and night,” Abu Mustafa told me. “There isn’t one second that we don’t have this awful sand blowing onto our faces. Back in Fallujah we had no food but at least we had our house and we could have died in dignity in one air strike.”
It’s heart-breaking to see families reduced to this. The people of Fallujah are known for their pride, and the undignified condition they are now abandoned to is a total failure of the humanitarian community, governments and donors.
We are all failing them.
The Norwegian Refugee Council is one of the few aid organisations operating in the camps. It is providing families with emergency food, water, hygiene kits and other basic relief items.
But resources are rapidly running out and people will start dying soon unless more aid and more agencies start reaching them. Water, food, tents and medicines are urgently needed. Right now we are only able to provide three litres of drinking water per person per day, and that is a dangerously low amount in the current extreme climate.
At another displacement camp site in Habaniya Tourist City, the director of the health centre told me of the skin rashes and water-borne diseases because of unsafe water people have resorted to drinking.
“The water quality of the lake is very bad and has a smell,” Azeez Mousa Hamad said. “People are drinking and washing in it. They will get sick and it is going to create a catastrophe for us here.”
People are going to die in these camps unless essential aid arrives now. The United Nations and the Iraqi government need to do much more to coordinate this catastrophic emergency and manage the squalid camp sites where our staff are working around the clock, but what we can offer right now is below minimum.
The governments engaged in the war against ISIS cannot abandon the tens of thousands of innocent civilians inevitably displaced by the fighting. They have the responsibility to match the billions of dollars they pump into bombs, weapons and fighter jets with the humanitarian needs this creates for so many women, children, men and the elderly.
What will distinguish us from ISIS if we abandon these people fleeing them just when they come to us for safety?
Karl Schembri is Middle East media advisor with the Norwegian Refugee Council. Follow him on twitter: @Karl_Schembri. Follow the Norwegian Refugee Council at Norwegian Refugee Council.
