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20,000 Iraqi Children Are Trapped by Falluja Battle, U.N. Warns
20,000 Iraqi Children Are Trapped by Falluja Battle, U.N. Warns
Douglas Schorzman, The New York Times
7 June 2016
Image: Women and children who fled their homes near Fallujah took shelter in Garma, Iraq, last month.
As the battle between Iraqi forces and Islamic State fighters intensified outside the city of Falluja, at least 20,000 children were among the civilians believed to be trapped and coming under fire in the city, the United Nations said on Wednesday.
“Very few families have been able to leave,” the United Nations’ children’s charity, Unicef said in a news release. “According to reports, food and medicine are running out and clean water is in short supply.”
A visit to the front lines by The New York Times on Sunday showed heavy and continuous shelling of the city by pro-government forces. Shiite militia commanders said the tempo of the fighting might be slowed before any assault on the city itself to allow more civilians to leave. But the commanders acknowledged that relatively few civilians — around 3,700, according to the United Nations — had been able to escape as the fighting intensified over the last week.
More than two years ago, Falluja became the first Iraqi city to be captured by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. In the months afterward, the group blitzed across northern and western Iraq, consolidating power in Sunni Arab areas where hostility toward the Shiite national government had long been boiling over.
Though it has lost other areas of Anbar Province around Falluja in recent months, the Islamic State has kept a strong hold on the city. Iraqi forces mostly kept it under an effective, but distant, siege, cutting it off from resupply by ISIS. That led to heightened fears about the civilian population and reported shortages of food and medicine in the months before the recent advance on Falluja began.
“I am desperately worried about what is happening to civilians in Falluja,” Lisa Grande, the top United Nations humanitarian official in Iraq, said in an interview this week.
Any direct assault on Falluja would most likely carry a high death toll. The Islamic State has had years to fortify the city, including the construction of a huge network of tunnels and traps that have been a focus of American airstrikes in recent days. Long before that, the city had been a stronghold of Sunni extremism. And it was the center of particularly deadly battles — for American forces and Iraqi civilians — during fighting to take the city in 2004.
In its announcement on Wednesday, Unicef expressed concern that children under Islamic State rule were at risk of being forced to fight for the militants.
“Children who are recruited see their lives and futures jeopardized as they are forced to carry and use arms, fighting in an adult war,” the agency said.
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© 2016, The New York Times
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