Parliament committee: unregistered refugees in Nineveh exceed 1 million
Displaced Iraqi civilians rescued at the site of battle rest at the positions of Iraqi forces at the Old City in Mosul, Iraq June 29, 2017. REUTERS/Erik De Castro
Baghdad (IraqiNews.com) More than one million displaced civilians are not registered by the migration authorities in Nineveh, an Iraqi parliament committee said Sunday.
“Since the beginning of Nineveh operations, there had been a large-scale migration movement that reached more than one million from Mosul, besides more than 954.000 from the rest of non-liberated Nineveh regions,” Zahed al-Khatouni, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s Migration and Displacement Ministry, said in a press statement quoted by AlGhad Press.
“We have approached the migration ministry to register more than one million migrants who are not registered despite staying at camps,” said Khatouni.
He, however, gave the ministry the excuse for that registration failure, saying that the daily volume of migration, which reached 17.000 people per day, had overwhelmed the ministry.
According to Khatouni, civilians repatriated in Mosul stood at 230.000, while the total of those displaced from the city reached 940.000.
More than four million people have been displaced since January 2014, when IS started to engage in a war against Iraqi troops and gain ground in a third of Iraq.
Refugees have regularly complained of food and medicine shortages both at refugee camps and areas that were still witnessing battles between Iraqi troops and IS. Many have also decried devastation of infrastructure and poor basic services after repatriation.