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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
IRAQ: Displaced Fallujah residents unsure of when they can return home
BAGHDAD, 20 December 2004 (IRIN) - Children play and sing songs around the tents they temporarily call home, as fathers queue to receive blankets from a local NGO.
More than two weeks after major fighting ended in Fallujah, about 60 km west of Baghdad, close to 200 families, amounting to more than 1,000 residents of the devastated city, are camped around a local mosque near Baghdad University.
A resident sheikh asks for the exact location not be named for security reasons. An additional estimated 2,000 are living in tent cities or with relatives or other families near mosques around Baghdad, according to figures from the Iraqi Red Crescent Society (IRCS).
"You should not believe it when they say the fighting has stopped," Nasser Mehssen, 48, told IRIN. "We are people from Fallujah, but we should also not be accused of being terrorists."
US military officials in October called on Fallujah residents to turn over Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was said to be hiding among insurgent groups. While al-Zarqawi has not been found, US troops in Fallujah discovered numerous caches of weapons and evidence of a network that may be linked to him, including houses where kidnapped foreigners were held.
But there is no electricity or water now in Fallujah and many houses have been destroyed. Interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi recently announced that some people could start returning home to assess the damage as soon as this week.
US officials have announced plans to give ID cards to residents that include fingerprints and retina scans, but so far only a few people have received the cards - mostly aid workers and interim government officials going in and out of the city.
"The situation is still unstable. Security is still fluctuating all the time," Jamal al-Karbuli, secretary general of the IRCS, told IRIN. "It can be calm one minute but 15 minutes later you have to run and hide because of gunfire and worse."
If heads of households go home, they'll just be arrested anyway, the sheikh told IRIN, declining to be named. "This is dreaming, if they think we can go back," the sheikh said. "They detained all of the men from 15 to 50 - how can people like me go back?"
A woman displaced by the fighting thought her family would never go back. She asked if there was any way for the interim government or aid agencies to make alternative housing options available.
"Renting housing is too expensive in Baghdad now and our husbands are unemployed since we had to leave," Zainab Hassam, 34, told IRIN.
Virtually all of Fallujah's estimated 200,000 people displaced by the fighting are also still living in temporary conditions in places such as Saklawiya, Habbaniya and Germa near Fallujah. Most of those areas are considered too dangerous for foreigners to go without being embedded with the US Marines in the area.
"We take them food, water, blankets - our most important focus is on the areas around Fallujah," said Abdul Hamid Salim, an information officer at the IRCS.
One of the biggest potential problems will be the time it takes to make the identification cards, al-Karbuli said. Based on the amount of time it took him to get processed for a card, it would take a year for every resident to receive one, he claimed.
"It took me 20 minutes to go through the procedure to get one," al-Karbuli said. "How will they do this for all of the people who live there?"
On the positive side, an Iraqi committee of government officials is working to get water and electricity working again and the schools and hospitals re-opened, al-Karbuli said.
IRCS workers did not go into Fallujah for almost a week after deciding to leave following an incident in which US Marines found and held some men they described as being "military-aged males" at its headquarters.
Young men who are in the city to guard their houses are not fighters, al-Karbuli said. He said he is unclear if such guards need aid or not.
Under the Geneva Conventions, however, such people are considered to be civilians if they are in civilian dress and don't carry weapons, al-Karbuli said. At the same time, US forces are saying such "military-aged males" could be
insurgents, he said.
Themes: (IRIN) Conflict, (IRIN) Early Warning, (IRIN) Governance, (IRIN) Health & Nutrition, (IRIN) Human Rights
[ENDS]
This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2004
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