On the Mosul Front

On the way there, our convoy with its cargo of four British Members of Parliament on a fact-finding mission stopped at a displaced persons camp, one of 20 or so that are scattered around the Kurdistan region. (The Kurdistan Regional Government or KRG is hosting more than a million and a half IDPs—internally displaced persons—and up to half a million refugees from Syria, a presence that has increased the region’s population by almost a third.)

The El Khazr camp is near the so-called “green line,” the border between the semi-independent Kurdish Autonomous Region and Iraq proper. It is in a district on the edge of the Nineveh plain that temporarily came under ISIS control in the summer of 2014, soon after the Caliphate’s stunning capture of Mosul and just before its foiled attempt to take Erbil.

We had already visited five refugee and IDP camps outside Iraqi Kurdistan’s main cities, but El Khazr felt very different.

Superficially it looks similar to those put up near Suleimaniya, Dohuk and Erbil (unsurprising, as like them it was constructed by the Kurdistani Peshmerga army). Row after row of blue-and-white tents roughly the size and shape of Quonset huts stretch out into the dusty distance, each tent separated from the next by a small concrete building with kitchen and bathroom facilities.

The wide “streets” in between the rows of tents are unpaved and rubbish-strewn but straight. Near the main gate there are some pre-fab offices bearing signs that proclaim the presence of NGOs and international organizations like World Food Program. Because Khazr, like most of the camps in the Kurdish region is an IDP camp rather than a refugee camp, the foreign NGO presence is small. (To count as a “refugee” rather than an IDP one has to have crossed a recognized international border).

But the atmospheric difference was apparent immediately on driving through the gate. The mood was as sullen as the heavy grey sky. Instead of the usual crowds of curious children skipping over to check out the new arrivals, we were stared at by unfriendly little clusters of young men of military age—a rare sight in the other camps we had visited.

Our Kurdistani Peshmerga escort, led by a colonel from the elite “Zeravani” brigade, formed a loose circle around the parliamentary delegation as it toured the camp. The soldiers were tense and watchful, scanning in all directions, fingers near the triggers of their AK-47s, clearly very aware of being outnumbered as they walked deeper into the camp. When groups of camp residents came too close, the Peshmerga politely but firmly asked them to move back. The hostile-looking youths seemed to stare with particular intensity at the (uncovered) women in the delegation.

The Peshmerga colonel explained that this camp was not, like the others we had so far seen, mostly inhabited by people who have over the last two years fled ISIS and its cruelties. Instead they are recent arrivals from Mosul and its suburbs, Sunni Arabs all, who have fled the fighting that has raged since the anti-ISIS coalition set out to liberate Mosul in October.

It’s an important distinction, and one that is not lost on the Kurdistani authorities running the camp, or the members of the Christian, Yazidi, and other Iraqi minority communities who make up the majority of the 1.5 million Iraqis who have taken refuge in the Kurdistan region. Both look with suspicion on the new arrivals from the Mosul area.

As the Kurdish colonel put it, given that almost all the people in the camp have been living under ISIS rule for some two years, and have only just decided to flee across the border now that ISIS seems on the verge of defeat, it’s probably not unfair to assume that a significant number are sympathetic to Daesh, if not active collaborators.

One of the Peshmerga soldiers was less diplomatic. “They are not running away from Daesh, they are Daesh!” he whispered in my ear.

According to the colonel, the Kurdistani authorities reckon that at least 20 percent of El Khazr’s inhabitants are connected to Daesh. Every week the KRG’s security service arrests more men in El Khazr whom they believe to be ISIS fighters who have discarded their weapons, uniforms, and beards. Many more may have escaped detection. The Peshmerga colonel said that the numbers of new arrivals coming from Mosul each day, “many in their own vehicles,” is now so great that it is “almost impossible” to vet all of them properly, or even to make sure that none have brought explosives or weapons with them.

The Kurdistani government has good reason to be nervous. From the Middle East to Africa and Central Asia, militants and terrorists have repeatedly exploited the safe haven of refugee and IDP camps as bases and recruiting grounds. (For a devastating account of the “refugee warrior” phenomenon you can hardly do better than Linda Polman’s book War Games, which tells how, in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, thousands more Rwandan Tutsis were murdered in raids conducted from refugee camps in Congo, the Hutu perpetrators returning home to be fed, housed, and watered by U.N. agencies and international NGOs.)

The prospect of terror attacks on hitherto safe Kurdistani cities by ISIS infiltrators embedded in the camp population is only one of the daunting problems the KRG’s leaders anticipate dealing with once the long, grim battle for Mosul’s streets and cellars has been won. (The lack of any kind of road map for a post-Caliphate settlement in Mosul and other mostly Sunni territories liberated from ISIS is possibly more frightening, especially given the Obama administration’s odd lack of interest in the question: It makes more likely than not some kind of multi-sided civil war involving Shia-Arab Baghdad and the various Iraqi provinces, cities and ethnic groups unwilling to return to its rule). But the possibility that a partially defeated ISIS will morph into a terror organization operating out of hundreds of refugee and IDP camps in the Middle East and beyond is something that the U.N., the aid world, and the international community should also be paying close attention to.

Jonathan Foreman is the author of Aiding and Abetting: Foreign Aid Failures and the 0.7% Deception (Civitas).