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A BLOCKADED refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan faces “disaster” in the event of a coronavirus outbreak, officials told the Morning Star today.
Maxmur refugee camp health committee co-chair Ismail Ayaz told visiting Morning Star international editor Steve Sweeney: “We have no masks, no ventilators, no medicine — just a few disposable masks.”
The UN High Commission for Refugees withdrew from the camp in 2014 as the armies of Islamic State swept through the region, and have not come back. Nurse Xanin Babuf told Mr Sweeney that residents felt abandoned by the UN, saying: “We don’t understand why the UN has done this to us.”
An Iraqi doctor visits the camp — which has 12,000 residents — for just two hours twice a week, and no residents may leave because the Kurdish Regional Government placed a “security” embargo on it in 2019 following the assassination of a Turkish intelligence agent in regional capital Erbil, though no evidence linked the killing to the camp.
The UN denies knowledge of the blockade, which is illegal under international law as a form of collective punishment.
