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Displacement despite U.S. surge

London: The number of Iraqis who have fled their homes but remained in the country has more than doubled to 1.14 million despite the “surge” in numbers of U.S. troops in recent months, according to a humanitarian organisation.

Statistics collected by the Iraqi Red Crescent Society showed 4,47,000 internally displaced Iraqis on January 1, soaring to the current figure on July 1 after the deployment of 30,000 extra American personnel starting in February.

The data, released at the weekend, show that sectarian conflict remains undiminished — despite Washington’s claims of an improvement in the security situation in the Baghdad area — and that different communities are now gravitating apart, creating a de facto partition as Shia Muslims move south and Sunnis to the centre and west.

The UNHCR said recently that on average 50,000 Iraqis were now fleeing their homes every month. The trend was confirmed last month by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), which found that internal displacements had escalated since the Al-Qaeda bombing of the Shia al-Askari shrine in Samarra in February 2006.

Some 2 million have now fled the country since the 2003 U.S. invasion, with most now living in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.

This exodus is proportionately the largest refugee movement in West Asia since the flight of the Palestinians when Israel was created in 1948. The IOM said 63 per cent of the internally displaced reported fleeing after direct threats to life, and that more than a quarter had been forcibly displaced from their property. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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