Is Iraq on the verge of another refugee crisis? Or worse?
I was driving across Northern Iraq this morning when I noticed something which took me back more than 20 years.
The baking Kurdish hillsides are covered with young fir trees now, but back then many of these hills were littered with short and roughly hewn stumps: Kurdish refugees, fleeing Saddam Hussein’s helicopter gunships in 1991, had chopped the trees down for firewood in order to survive.
So the trees which have been planted since are to me a living reminder of the last refugee crisis I witnessed here; as are the growing number of families crammed into schools, hotels and tents.
If jihadist fighters advance any further north, we might be on course for a repeat scenario: the creation of a safe haven, guarded by US fighter jets with possible assistance from Britain, France and Turkey.
Back in 1991, foreign troops were deployed to maintain the safe zone. The Americans called it Operation Provide Comfort. They weren’t there to fight – but to organise the humanitarian response, after aid agencies were overwhelmed. It worked.
US action
My fear is that although UNHCR has received over $600 million in pledges this time around, it may not be able to spend and deploy that money quickly enough in order to cope. The local estimate is that 650,000 refugees have arrived or been displaced in the Dohuk governorate alone since June.
The pressing issue now is how to get the thousands of Yazidis off the Sinjar mountains. But if the refugee flows grow dramatically across the 600 mile Kurdish border, feeding the refugees for weeks (if not months) to come could become a major issue in itself, requiring a military humanitarian response.
The early signs are that US air strikes have halted the jihadist advance; but with a 600 mile border to choose from, there are several points from which IS can probe north.
And the ingredients for a humanitarian disaster are all there. Searing heat, ruthless and highly motivated jihadists armed with stolen high tech military kit and funded by illicit oil sales, facing a Kurdish peshmerga force demonstrably incapable so far of holding its line without the American back-up of the last few days.
The best hope of returning Iraqi refugees to their homes will not rest on American air strikes – but in the Americans arming, training and indeed managing Kurdish peshmerga forces in ways they have not done so far.
This will upset US relations with Baghdad even more than they are are upset already. And how far south the Americans decide to bomb could have extraordinary repercussions, laying the ground for the borders of an eventual breakaway Kurdish state.
But surely better to plan now for the recreation of a Kurdish safe haven than to return to the scenes of refugee misery I witnessed in 1991 – and those trees being chopped down all over again.
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