MOSUL, Iraq // Aliyah Hussein and 25 family members sheltering with her in Mosul’s western Mahatta district survive by picking wild greens growing in a park near their home. Hussein mixes these with small amounts of rice and tomato paste to make a thin soup that is often her family’s only meal.
“I swear to God, we are hungry. ISIL made us hungry. They didn’t leave anything for us, they even stole our food,” Ms Hussein said.
Her home is just a few hundred metres from the front line as Iraqi forces battle to drive the extremist militants from western Mosul. As they slowly progress, clawing back territory house by house and block by block, food supplies are running dangerously low for the civilians trapped in ISIL-held territory.
Even areas that have technically been liberated, such as Mahatta, are out of reach for most humanitarian groups because of safety concerns.
Ms Hussein said that in the past week she said she received only one box of food containing of rice, oil and tomato paste, barely enough to feed her entire family for a single day.
“The women didn’t have lunch. Only the children and men have eaten,” said Zuhair Abdul Karim, Ms Hussein’s cousin.
He said the family were living from meal to meal. “We don’t know if we’ll have dinner – maybe or maybe not.”
Some people walk several kilometres to markets that have sprung up in areas that have been under Iraqi military control longer, but the prices there are high. Most families in Mosul have exhausted their savings, and work is almost non-existent in a city ripped apart by war.
“The humanitarian world needs to realise that there is a huge gap between people who are in the safe zone and people who are actually trapped in the no man’s land between the Iraqi-controlled areas and Daesh-controlled areas,” said Alto Labetubun of Norwegian People Aid, one of the few groups operating in districts close to the front line.
Between 300,000 and 500,000 people remain beyond reach in ISIL-held areas of Mosul, according to the United Nations. For those civilians, siege-like conditions have prevented food supplies from reaching them for more than six months.
Most of them are believed to be in Mosul’s old city, where the final battles of the operation to drive out the extremists are expected to play out. If the fighting there lasts many more weeks, the UN warns, the consequences for civilians will be catastrophic.
“We know we have a problem because when people reach our camps the first thing they ask for is food,” said Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq. She said it was impossible to measure exactly how many families were facing “serious hunger” inside Mosul, but the condition of people who fled the city painted a grim picture of those who remained trapped.
Hundreds of infants and young children who fled recently are being treated for malnutrition, Ms Grande said.
“If the battle goes beyond [the next few weeks], then we have a catastrophic problem.”
In the Wadi Al Hajar neighbourhood hundreds of people queued for food boxes delivered by Norwegian People Aid. But most of them were turned away as there are not enough supplies to go around. A small crowd of women begged the aid workers for food after the last boxes were handed out.
Ibrahim Khalil, who was also turned away, said he was starving.
“Didn’t they claim they’d liberate us from Daesh?!” he said, referring to the Iraqi government, “and they’d change our lives from misery to happiness?”
* Associated Press