DUBAI
Residents of the besieged city of Fallujah are starving. Iraqi government forces should urgently allow aid to enter the city, and the Daesh extremist group, which captured the city in early 2014, is refusing to let civilians leave.
“The people of Fallujah are besieged by the government, trapped by [Daesh], and are starving,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The warring parties should make sure that aid reaches the civilian population.”
Since government forces recaptured nearby Ramadi, the capital of Anbar governorate, in late December 2015, and the Al Jazira desert area north of Fallujah in March 2016, they have cut off supply routes into the city, three Iraqi officials said. Tens of thousands of civilians from an original population of more than 300,000 remain inside the city.
Human Rights Watch and other aid agencies have not had access to Fallujah, and it is very difficult to get information from the remaining residents because Daesh prohibits the use of mobile phones and the internet. Instead, residents sometimes manage to catch a cell tower signal at night and are able to respond to some messages or speak to others who act as intermediaries in a tenuous line of communication,
Iraqi activists who are in touch with Fallujah families said that people were reduced to eating flat bread made with flour from ground date seeds and soups made from grass.
What little food remains is being sold at exorbitant prices. A 50-kilogram sack of flour goes for $750 (Dh2,700) and a bag of sugar for $500, whereas in Baghdad, 70 kilometres to the east, the same amount of flour costs $15 and of sugar $40, one Fallujah resident said.
In late March, a Fallujah medical source told Human Rights Watch that each day starving children arrive at the local hospital and that most foodstuffs are no longer available at any price.
An Iraqi official in touch with some Fallujah families provided a list of 140 people, many elderly and young children, whom the official said had died over the past few months from lack of food and medicine. The official did not want the names of the dead published for fear that Daesh, which prohibits contacting people outside the city, would punish relatives of the dead.
A new campaign, “Fallujah Is Being Killed by Starvation,” has sought to draw attention to the impact of the siege. In one recent video that Baghdad-based activists provided, an unidentifiable woman says she is from Fallujah and that her children are dying because there is no rice, no flour — not even local dates — and the hospital has run out of baby food.
The Facebook account “Fallujah is my city” posted a video on March 23, showing several lifeless bodies in a body of water. Baghdad-based activists said that it shows a mother who drowned herself and her two children because she could not find food. Another activist from Fallujah, now based in Iraqi Kurdistan, corroborated this account based on information from relatives still in Fallujah.
On March 24, the World Food Programme said that it remained “concerned about the food security situation in besieged Fallujah, [where] many food items were unavailable in markets”.
Iraqi government troops and the Popular Mobilisation Forces, an auxiliary paramilitary force, are keeping shipments of food and other goods from reaching the city, two Iraqi officials and other sources said. The Defence Ministry, Baghdad Joint Operations Command, and Popular Mobilisation Commission did not respond to requests for comment.
Civilians inside Fallujah have been unable to leave.
An Iraqi lawyer who has maintained phone contacts with people in the city said that on March 22, Daesh executed a man for trying to leave the day before. “He walked straight up to the Daesh checkpoint and told them he wanted to leave because he couldn’t take the situation any longer,” the lawyer said. “Daesh brought him into town and executed him.”
Three people with connections in Fallujah said that in late February, Daesh had executed a family trying to leave. Their extended family revolted against Daesh, and Daesh then jailed more than 100 men taking part. A journalist with sources inside Fallujah confirmed that Daesh was preventing people from leaving and punishing those trying to do so. On March 30, the Popular Mobilisation Forces said that Daesh had executed 35 civilians in Fallujah for trying to escape.
“[Daesh] has shown utter disregard for protecting civilians in conflict,” Stork said. “It should not add mass starvation to its miserable record and should immediately allow civilians to leave Fallujah.”
Lise Grande, the United Nations deputy special representative in Iraq, said, “People are trying to leave the city but are prevented from doing so.” A local official said the government had opened three exit routes for civilians in Fallujah to flee the city, which Anbar governor Suhaib Al Rawi repeated to Al Sabah newspaper. However, Baghdad-based activists said Daesh was still blocking civilians from leaving.
Civilians in Fallujah have also suffered considerable harm from the fighting. Government aircraft and artillery have carried out numerous attacks, which Fallujah residents say have killed many civilians. Neighbours reported to one former resident that on November 27 last year, bombings killed 12 people in his neighbourhood, including nine children. On August 13 last year, aerial bombs struck Fallujah’s children’s hospital, killing several people, a relative of a staff member of the hospital said.
A medical source in the city said that since January 2014, 5,769 combatants and civilians have been injured and 3,455 killed, roughly one-fourth of them women and children.
“The humanitarian picture in Fallujah is bleak and getting bleaker,” Stork said. “Greater international attention to the besieged towns and cities of the region is needed or the results for civilians could be calamitous.”