Iraqi minister: Mosul refugees will be stopped from entering Kurdistan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraq’s immigration minister has warned that an expected offensive to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIS) will likely displace up to 750,000 residents of Iraq’s second-largest city, saying the refugees would not be allowed to enter the autonomous Kurdistan Region and will be kept in areas under Baghdad’s control.

“The Mosul offensive might displace 250,000 to 750,000 people,” Darbaz Muhammad told Rudaw.

“We plan not to allow the refugees enter the Kurdistan Region, and instead to settle them in areas which were under the jurisdiction of the central Iraqi government prior to the 2003 US invasion,” he said, adding that was “only for security concerns.”

He explained that “the refugees will be placed in camps.”

Mosul has been ISIS’s stronghold in Iraq since June 2014, when its militants attacked from Syria and routed the Iraqi army and government institutions.

The Kurdistan Region hosts some 1.8 million refugees from Syria and Iraqi internally displaced persons, or IDPs.

The IDPs are mostly from Mosul and Anbar province, who were forced to flee their homes when ISIS seized swathes of Iraq and Syria and began persecuting Shiites and religious minorities.

The influx now equals approximately 35 percent of the local population, settled in camps in Duhok, Sulaimani and Erbil provinces.

Early last month Iraq's Defense Minister Khaled al-Obaidi, who visited the Makhmour front in the north, told Rudaw that the Mosul operation will come sooner than ISIS may expect.

On Wednesday, Lt.-Gen. Najim al-Jibouri, who commands the Nineveh Operations said that ISIS is using the large civilian population in Mosul as “human shields” and that is the largest hurdle for Iraqi forces reportedly preparing to liberate the city from the militants.

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