A Peshmerga unit ion the front lines outside Kirkuk. Boris Niehaus/Demotix. All rights reserved.In near-freezing temperatures and a drizzling rain that had turned the red earth to sludge, two colleagues and I trudged through row after row of tents in a camp for displaced people in northern Iraq. “Qais,” about 20 years old, welcomed us inside, where a gas burner provided some warmth and a flashlight illuminated the tent for his family of four.
By the time of our visit in early December, Qais had been at the camp for nine days. He said his family escaped in September from an ISIS-held village only a few kilometres from the front line with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces and finally made it to this camp. He is one of a growing number of Iraqis who take immense risks fleeing ISIS but face continued insecurity in government-held territory. We interviewed a dozen people with similar stories.
Qais’s family and about 30 other people fled after an airstrike killed the village head and all eight members of his family: “ISIS guys kept coming to his house and made wireless calls from just outside. They had taken and tortured the village head in the weeks before, suspecting him of informing government forces about their positions. Through their calls, they succeeded in making the coalition think it was an ISIS house, I think. If it were an Iraqi plane, we would have seen it, but the coalition planes fly too high to spot.”
