ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – NGOs, state organizations and the military must coordinate to provide the primary care that people fleeing Mosul will need, the World Health Organization (WHO) said at a conference in Erbil Thursday, as Peshmerga and Iraqi forces tightened the noose on ISIS in its stronghold of Mosul. “The primary purpose of the meeting was to try to identify who either from the department of health or the NGOs could potentially step up and provide service coverage in those sites and identify where those gaps are,” Scott Pendergast, Director of Strategy Planning for Emergency for WHO told Rudaw. “The first stage is to try to match those gaps.” Pendergast said “gaps” referred to the distance from those in need of care, the screening process for health security regulations and receiving the assistance required. As much as security is a raised concern, health concerns, particularly preventing the spread of disease is just as prevalent. “As we have been led to believe and understand, should ISIS use a population and as human shields and as the offensive goes on we can anticipate a lot of trauma and injury,” Altaf S. Musani, Representative of Mission at World Health Organization told Rudaw. “That access trauma and injury will need to be managed within hours if not minutes to ensure survival. So an unknown factor is, what is the distance between the mustering side and the screening side and the actual settlement period?” he asked “If it’s short,” Musani explained, “then obviously health care providers can easy stabilize and trauma and triage out those who are the most wounded. If it’s a distance that is great and a distance that is not accessible, it just lends to the complexity of ensuring survival. This is why we are encouraging the coordination with the military by the departments of health and those NGOs who actually have the appetite to work in conflict zones to close that gap.” “In Mosul, the displacement flows will happen in multiple directions,” Musani added. “That is forcing us to plan, not in one governorate but in five. These are just a few complexities that bring concern on how do we better prepositioned health capacity” Pendergast felt confident in the coordination established from the conference. “From what we did today, there doesn’t seem to be enormous gaps,” he reflected. “There seems to be enough people around who can provide those services but we just have to make sure we can provide them at the right quantity and that they are supported throughout financing staff or supplies.” “I think this is one of the first times where we are actually creating a structure where we can bring the department of health, the NGOs together with the military to actually plan the health operations,” Pendergast relayed. “This needs to be continued primarily at the zone level where they are going to be making day to day decisions about movement of particular capacities to meet moving needs and then we need to bring this up to this level on a regular basis to make sure planning out our resources well.” Since the operation to liberate Mosul commenced Monday morning, 135 buildings have been destroyed crucially damaging the city’s infrastructure, according to Anna Soave, Human Settlement Advisor for United Nations Human Settlement Programme. This was particularly true for the city’s airport of which there is “nothing left”. From the damage, massive looting has been occurring to the point where there is nothing left from the remaining buildings. “How will things be restarted,” she rhetorically asked the attendees at the conference.
