One of the inhabitants, a black-chadored Shiite woman in her 20s with five children from the Mosul area in northwestern Iraq, told Al-Monitor that her husband and his four brothers had been killed and then beheaded in front of her by IS members.
Some of the fighters, she said, let her and the other women and children go on the condition that they not tell anyone, as their superiors in the Sunni jihadist organization "would kill them otherwise" for letting them go. She said they were taken near a peshmerga checkpoint and released, and later traveled another few hundred kilometers to be closer to other Shiites.
Deputy camp director Mustafa Hussein told Al-Monitor that he had received several reports from camp residents that KRG peshmerga had confiscated the IDs of the displaced at checkpoints on their way to the camp, and that some had been beaten. He said that half of the housing was still empty but would be filled soon.
Further south, in Karbala, Al-Monitor visited an informal camp housing hundreds in accommodation normally used for pilgrims to the city holy to Shiites.
Most of the approximately 2.7 million Iraqis internally displaced since January 2014 are not living in formal camps. According to IOM data released last month, an overwhelming "96% of the total displaced population are living in private accommodation, including rentals, hotels and with host families. Another 3% are in critical shelter arrangements, mainly public and unfinished buildings, and 1% are in camps."
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