DAQUQ, Iraq (Reuters) — The United Nations said on Thursday (October 13) it is bracing for the world’s biggest and most complex humanitarian effort in the upcoming battle for the Iraqi city of Mosul, which could make up to 1 million people homeless and see civilians used as human shields or even gassed.
U.S.-backed Iraqi forces are preparing for a long-anticipated assault on the last major Islamic State bastion in Iraq, potentially the biggest battle in the country since the U.S.-led invasion of 2003.
The U.N. Humanitarian Co-ordinator for Iraq, Lise Grande, said in a worst-case scenario, Mosul could represent “the single largest, most complex humanitarian operation in the world in 2016”.
“You would have mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people. You would have hundreds of thousands of people who are held as human shields inside the town. You would have a chemical attack that would put tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even more at grave risk. If all of that were to happen at the same time it would be catastrophic,” Grande told Reuters.
The assault of Mosul could begin by the end of this month, according to Iraqi sources including a government security advisor, a provincial official and an army field commander.
Of the up to 1.5 million people believed to be in Mosul now, around 200,000 are expected to try and escape as Islamic State digs in for its most important fight.
With a pre-war population of around 2 million, Mosul is by far the biggest city held by the militants – around four to five times the size of any other city recaptured so far from the fighters, who swept through northern Iraq in 2014 and also hold a swathe of Syria.