Iraq’s
Ministry of Displacement and Migration on Monday announced that in the past
three days, about 421 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) returned from camps
to their original residential areas in the northern province of Nineveh.
Ali
Abbas Jahakir, a senior ministry official, explained in a statement that the
returnees were from the government-sponsored camps in Nineveh’s eastern and
southern parts as well as those of Salahuddin province. He added that the IDPs
returned to their homes in towns and villages across Nineveh.
The
official detailed that 235 of the returnees were located at the al-Ilm wa
al-Karama camps in Salahuddin, 64 were from al-Khazer in eastern Mosul, with
the remaining 122 being from the al-Jad’a, al-Madraj, and Haj Ali south of
Mosul.
The
displacement ministry had coordinated with the transport ministry as well as
security forces to allocate the prospective returnees with buses and move them
back to their areas safely, Jahakir said.
Early
last month, the Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Iraq director, Rishana
Haniffa, said over 300,000 residents of Iraq’s Mosul are still displaced, with
no homes to go back to two years since the liberation of the city from ISIS.
The
organization stated that the remaining displaced people of Mosul make up about
a fifth of Iraq’s entire displaced population of 1.6 million right now—1.2
million of which are in the autonomous Kurdistan Region, according to data from
the Kurdistan Region’s Joint Crisis Coordination Center (JCC).
Iraqi
forces with the support of Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and the US-led coalition
liberated Mosul from the terrorist group in July 2017. Two years later, the
city remains mostly in ruins.
According
to NRC, about 138,000 houses were damaged or destroyed in the city during the
conflict. In western Mosul alone, there are still over 53,000 houses
flattened and thousands more damaged.