ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – It is expected that more than 200,000 people in Mosul will require emergency health care, the World Health Organization reported on Thursday. International agencies are worried that the estimated one million residents of Mosul have not had adequate access to healthcare under more than two years of ISIS rule as the militants have executed doctors, and limited access to food and money means malnutrition is a serious problem. The World Health Organization said on Thursday that $35 million is needed to provide the emergency health care needed for the citizens of Mosul. The international health body is currently vaccinating displaced children who have not received vaccinations for more than two years. Last week, the UN said it is “deeply concerned” about the health of pregnant women in the city. “Whether women live or die in a crisis often depends on whether they can access basic sexual and reproductive health services, which too often take a back seat to other urgent needs, like food and shelter,” said Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNFPA, to the United Nations Population Fund, on the Protection of Women and Girls in Mosul, in a statement. Dr. Osotimehin estimates there are 8,000 pregnant women in Mosul who may be cut off from life-saving emergency obstetric care. During its more than two years of rule in Mosul, ISIS militants have reportedly executed dozens of doctors. Rudaw received reports of at least 18 doctors being executed in the city for refusing to treat wounded militants. Last week, the militants were holding doctors hostage in al-Jamhouri hospital, threatening to execute them if they tried to leave, the Mosul Eye reported. In July 2015, a senior member of an underground resistance movement in Mosul, Mohammed Baaj, told Rudaw that ISIS was transferring their own wounded militants to Syria for healthcare as the resources were not available in Mosul. “However, the residents are also suffering from the lack of medical treatment and they are in need of urgent help.” In December 2014, the director of Ibn Sina Teaching Hospital in Mosul, Hassan Fadel Allaf, told Rudaw, “Dozens of doctors in the hospital were arrested an executed because they refused to go with ISIS to their strongholds.”
