“We don’t have a house there and life there is hard, there are no salaries and the situation of Mosul is dangerous. That is why I have come back,” Farah told Rudaw on Thursday from Khazir camp.
She first left her home in Mosul with her two children at the onset of the Mosul operation in October 2016.
On a daily basis 50 individuals who went back to Mosul are returning to the camps in the KRG due to lack of services and lack of employment, officials at the camp said.
“With the onset of 2018, noticeable numbers of families are coming to the camps and ask to be settled there. We can say 150-160 families have returned to the camps so far,” a supervisor at the camp said.
The refugee camp officials claim that should this continue they would have to reopen closed camps.
“I went back to Mosul hoping to find a job, but I could not find a job. Life is very difficult there. We believe life in the camps is better as we are paid money and we are helped. There are no schools and no services in Mosul. Mosul needs time,” Khayri Hamad, another returnee said.
The city, especially the west, is heavily militarized and few people have returned. There have been disputes between the Shiite-led Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary groups and locals who are mostly Arab Sunni or other ethno-religious minorities in Nineveh province.
“It is generally the system everywhere that the army is only concerned with external threats and the police are concerned with internal security. But it is not like that currently, and there is the army, police, Hashd and other groups, and that has damaged security,” another returnee said of the situation in what was Iraq’s second-largest and most diverse cities prior to the ISIS war.
There were ten camps for Mosul IDPs opened in Erbil, but three were closed after the liberation of Mosul and some IDPs returning to their city. 111,000 people were settled in KRG’s camps from Mosul following the liberation operation.
Mosul was declared liberated in July, but the city is yet to be fully re-populated. Sunni factions in the Iraqi parliament cited this as a reason for postponing Iraq’s elections set for May 12.
The Iraqi Observatory for Human Rights has claimed that some parties in the Iraqi government are forcing people to return to their areas, a claim refuted by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
Additionally, some displaced individuals living in the KRG do not wish to go back to their cities and would like to stay after Baghdad ordered the shutdown of Iraqi schools operating in the KRG.
