ERBIL - Saad Sabir’s neighbours allowed him to jump the queue of 300 families waiting for winterisation items from a United Nations agency on Tuesday so he could get to his son’s wedding later in the day. Sabir fled Islamic State militants when they overran what was the predominantly Christian town of Qaraqosh in northern Iraq in August and he has been living with the help of strangers in Erbil ever since. His son’s wedding was to be held in a makeshift church consisting of a large tent with the blue letters of Unicef, the UN’s children’s fund, stamped all over it. But first the families had to collect their winter kits. These include blankets, plastic sheets, water jerry cans, kerosene jerry cans and kerosene heaters and stoves. They are being distributed by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). “My friends kindly let me go first so we can prepare for the wedding,” said Sabir, who used to work as an educational advisor. “In times like this, you have to do every ritual whether it’s cultural or religious.” When he and his family first arrived in Kurdistan, they lived in a school. Then they shared a room with 30 others. He is now living in an unfinished house in Ozal City on the outskirts of the Kurdish capital. Also waiting for a winterisation kit was Azhar Nisan Khodr, who used to work as a nurse in Qaraqosh. She was calm and patient until asked about how she was able to survive. “We are very angry because Baghdad has not helped us at all or even paid our salaries,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the church and other people from the outside, we would be struggling even more. The Kurdish government is doing all it can but it also has an economic crisis so it can’t do more.” She was particularly excited about receiving a heater but she also worried about how she would pay for the fuel to run it. The Kurdish Regional Government is currently deciding how much it will subsidise fuel and then the UN plans to start a voucher scheme to help people like her. Although it was hard to imagine the need for a heater in the bright clear sunshine at the IOM’s distribution point, the agency has speeded up the issue of kits because deep winter is fast approaching and nights are already cold in the tents and unfinished houses where many people are living. There are almost 900,000 Iraqi internally displaced people—half of the total in the country—as well as 215,000 Syrian refugees now in the Kurdish region. The IOM is particularly well-placed to co-ordinate the distribution of winter kits because it can identify who is most in need through its displacement tracking matrix, which counts how many displaced people there are across Iraq. The UN has warned that $173.1 million is need for winterisation efforts alone. IOM began distribution of full winterisation kits on October 11. More than 9,000 kits have been distributed across 10 governorates. At the beginning of this month, it said current funding levels will enable it to provide an additional 31,000 winterised kits to serve an estimated 186,000 IDPs throughout Iraq. More kits will be distributed if funding permitted.
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