With partners, UNHCR is providing life-saving protection and assistance to newly-displaced families, making sure they have adequate shelter, and basic household items including mattresses, stoves, kitchen and hygiene sets and jerry cans. So far, more than 5,705 emergency relief packages have been distributed by UNHCR.
And with temperatures declining, the focus is on protecting people against the weather and keeping them safe and warm. We plan to reach 1.2 million people in Iraq with special winterized kits including blankets, heating stoves, plastic tarpaulins and water and kerosene jerry cans. UNHCR is also providing cash assistance and plans to winter-proof 53,000 tents.
UNHCR is also bolstering protection monitoring and psychosocial and legal assistance through mobile teams to ensure timely interventions when problems are identified. Among the main concerns are family reunifications, supporting female-headed households, a lack of documentation and supporting victims of abuse.
In the camps, families who have spent more than two years under the control of armed groups, have spoken of tight restrictions and curtailed freedoms, as well as a lack of access to impartial information. To help fill this vacuum, UNHCR is supporting an initiative with BBC Media Action and Radio Nawa to initiate a programme to help newly-displaced families access timely information. This week, 2,000 small transistor radios were distributed in UNHCR’s Hasansham camp.
Radio Nawa has installed a new transmitter to reach the camp. Residents will be able to listen to an unbiased, non-partisan information service, take part in radio phone-ins, raise questions or comments, and engage on-air with local and central government officials and the Iraqi security forces. Further distributions are planned in other camps in coming weeks.
UNHCR would like to thank donors for the support that they have given to date. Still, we urgently need additional resources to support the tens of thousands living in miserable conditions. We remain deeply concerned about the plight of civilians and — at the end of the first month of the campaign — call for international humanitarian law to be upheld.
(Source: UNHCR )
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