ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—Iraq’s parliament on Saturday warned that the United Nations shutting down health clinics across the country will have grim consequences, notably for the country’s more than 3 million refugees which includes at least half a million children.
Abdulhussein Mousawi, a member of parliament’s health committee, described the decision as “worse than the ISIS war” and that it will “endanger lives of many fleeing people often without any support system.”
The UN said it closed the health centers due to a lack of the funding it needed to continue to operate 184 frontline health services in the country. The decision will affect 80 percent of the general health programs supported by humanitarian partners, a UN statement said.
“It’s devastating, inexplicable really, that we are being forced to shut down program in a country where so much is at stake and where the international community is so involved,” said Lise Grande, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, in a statement.
UN officials in Iraq said the world bodies humanitarian partners in the country urgently need $498 million to provide their critical services, for the reminder of the year, to the displaced Iraqis and refugees from neighboring Syria who have often been sheltered in temporary camps in northern and southern provinces of Iraq.
Mousawi said the decision would profoundly impact children who have relied on the UN centers for vaccinations against polio and against tuberculosis, which the lawmaker said was gaining ground in Iraq again.
Mousawi slammed Iraq’s government for failure to secure funds for the UN and warned that disease will threaten the lives of many children in affected areas.
“The government could have provided the financial aid the UN needed to continue to operate the clinics which were as important as the war against terror in the country,” Mousawi told local media in Baghdad.
According to UN estimates 8.2 million people are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance, including 2.3 million living in areas controlled by the ISIS, Grande’s UN office said.
