(Amnesty International) – “When we came here, we walked past our village. I would walk and cry, looking around at all the destroyed houses. Everything had fallen.” This lament of an elderly woman from a village near Mosul plainly states how so many people in northern Iraq have lost so much, so quickly. When Amnesty International spoke to her in an internally displaced persons’ (IDP) camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq last week, like many others from the villages and suburbs east of Mosul, she had fled the ongoing fighting between Iraqi and coalition armed forces and the armed group calling itself Islamic State (IS), bringing little more than the clothes on her back and harrowing tales of life under IS rule and under mortars and air strikes. Many have already been displaced several times to escape hunger and poverty as result of IS repression in their villages, as well as clashes. They have lost most of their possessions, property and livelihoods.
