On my way to the Khazir Camp 37km east of the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, I passed the bridge over the Khazir River that was destroyed by the Islamic State (IS) group in 2014. Workers are now trying to reconstruct the bridge, and meanwhile the river continues on its path, oblivious to the events around it as families now back in their villages continue with their work. There are partially and completely destroyed houses all around, including destroyed shops once used by IS to prepare car bombs. As we passed many checkpoints, my escort Aram pointed to hundreds of white spots in a desert-like place with small hills all around them. It looked like a tourist camp waiting out the winter with its rain and snow, but was in fact the Khazir Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) Camp. The Khazir Camp was established along with the Hassan Sham Camp for families fleeing the conflict zones at the beginning of the operations to retake Mosul from IS last October. Today, the area is full of agony and horror stories. It is a very crowded place, with tens of thousands of families reaching the camp in their own cars and some bearing white flags. They leave their cars outside the gates of the camp, where Iraqi red crescent vehicles, the security forces, NGO members and families that fled Mosul in 2014 come to meet the new arrivals. Saja, 11 years old, was carrying eggs, wearing light clothes that did not suit the cold weather, and leading her five-year-old brother Hamza. She refused to be photographed, adding that she had not been able to wash her face. Saja's family had reached the camp on the tenth day of the military operations to retake Mosul. She had stopped going to primary school when she was in the fourth grade in 2014. “My father was worried about me. Everything became strange and our life changed,” she explained. She had bought the eggs from a market established as soon as the IDPs first reached the Camp. It is a small market, yet it provides vegetables, fruit, foodstuffs, clothes and household goods, while the government, NGOs and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) provide tents, blankets, mattresses, stoves, heaters and cooking utensils. Saja entered the camp, and her brother Hamza ran after her playing with a small toy car. Ahmed Hassan left Mosul in June 2014 with his wife. They had a daughter at the time, and now they also have a son, though Ahmed's parents have never seen him. When he left Mosul, Ahmed rented a small house in the town of Erbil. Today, he wishes that the authorities would allow his family to leave the Khazir Camp to join him in Erbil. I left him with tears in his eyes as he saw his father emerge from the camp. While Ahmed was not allowed to enter it, his father was allowed out, and their tears joined as they greeted each other through the camp's wire fencing. Hanna, a nurse who has not worked since June 2014, was waiting for her daughter and son-in-law whom she had not seen since then outside the Khazir Camp. She was tired, and her daughter and her husband had walked for hours while IS was raining their neighbourhood in Mosul (Al-Samah) with mortar fire. Hanna's older son, a policeman, was executed by IS in Mosul, while her daughter-in-law and herself had been arrested for five days without knowing why. She said that now that the Al-Samah neighbourhood of Mosul had been liberated from IS, she wanted to go back to the city. Hanna, her husband, the widow of her son and grandchildren and her other son with his family occupied three tents. They and other families from the liberated areas cannot return to their homes as long as their identification papers are held by the authorities of the Camp. Mohamed, 22, was a student at the Law Faculty at Mosul University until it was closed by IS. He was arrested twice during the IS occupation of the city and lashed because he had no beard, causing him to stop shaving and to grow one. He was forced with dozens of others to attend the public execution of one of his friends just days before the Mosul operations began. The executed man had been accused of spying and sending information to the Iraqi authorities. “On that day 16 young men from Mosul were executed,” Ahmed said. “It is very cold,” Jerjis, a 45-year-old man, complained, adding that “the amount of kerosene we have been given is not enough and we are afraid the kerosene heaters will catch fire in the plastic tents.” His cousin Ali reached the camp with his family on the day I was there. They were tired, but were glad to find a safe place. “We were late in reaching the camp because on the day we tried to escape, IS targeted our neighbourhood [Aden] in Mosul with car bombs,” he said. “There was a real shortage of food and water in the city,” he added, mentioning that “the counter-terrorism forces shared their provisions with us.” The reason Jerjis left his house in the liberated neighbourhood of Aden was to find the rest of his family, eventually tracing them to the Khazir Camp. Sadly, he found that one of his brothers had been killed in the car bomb explosions and his mother and sister had been wounded. The camp harbours more than 4,000 families and has electricity provided by generators for four hours a day. There are also mobile health clinics. “But proper infrastructure needs more funds and more time to install,” one local activist said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “The Iraqi Human Rights Commission published a statement at the end of November warning of a humanitarian disaster in the IDPs camps because of poor services, the rising number of IDPs, and the onset of winter,” he said. “We have been left to confront terrorism by the international community, but the international community is not supporting us. We need more funds to make life bearable in the camps.” Life in an IDPs camp does not look like life outside. Families live very close to each other, and many do not have proper sanitary facilities. They stand in queues together, trying to help the weaker ones among them. They exchange painful stories. However, this camp at least has become a place where many IDPs can find family members and friends who they may have thought had been killed. There are lots of tears — tears of pain and tears of happiness.
