400,000 ‘trapped’ in west Mosul’s Old City, says UN

TIL Desk/World/Geneva-About 600,000 people remain in the areas of west Mosul held by the Islamic State group, including 400,000 who are “trapped” in the Old City under siege-like conditions, the UN said.

“They are desperate for food. They are panicked,” Bruno Geddo, who represents the UN refugee agency in Iraq, told reporters in Geneva by phone from a transit centre for displaced people near Mosul. He said people arriving at the Hammam al-Alil transit centre about 20 kilometres south of Iraq’s second largest city described the desperate situation they left behind.

“There is a shortage of fuel, of food, of electricity. People have resorted to burning furniture, old clothes, anything they can use to keep warm at night, because it is still raining heavily and the temperatures at night in particular drop significantly,” he said. “It is very, very limited what they can eat,” he said, adding that people were surviving primarily on a little bread and water, and many were eating just once a day.