UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie visited West Mosul, Iraq on Saturday to meet the hundreds of displaced families returning to the remains of their homes, almost a year after the city’s liberation from Islamic State.
This is Jolie’s fifth visit to Iraq and 61st mission with the UN Refugee Agency. She arrived in the city on the second day of Eid al-Fitr, the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan.
For three years, ISIS occupied West Mosul. To re-take the city, citizens faced aerial bombardment, artillery barrage, cross-fire, and snipers every day. People were used as human shields or killed as they tried to escape the war. Large areas of the city were destroyed.
Now, with the assistance from the UNHCR families are slowly returning to the city to rebuild their homes.
Jolie, who has worked with the UN since 2001, urged the international community not to forget about the people in West Mosul and the struggles they now face.
One man told the Special Envoy about his 17-year-old daughter who had lost her legs in a mortar-strike and bled to death because she was denied medical treatment. The mortar had tore through their roof. Zubayda’s family have now returned to West Mosul to rebuild their house. Other young girls told Jolie about not being able to go to school, seeing death, and feeling too afraid to leave the house.
Jolie described the city as “the worst devastation I’ve seen in all my years with the UNHCR,” in a video shared by the organisation.
These people have lost everything and the trauma and the loss that they’ve suffered is unparalleled. They’re here on their own with very little support – next to nothing – and they’re rebuilding themselves with their bare hands.
They’re moving the rubble with their bare hands and there are bodies in this rubble that stay here and you can smell the bodies. Some of them have family members that are here and they’re unable to move them.
And there’s unexploded ordnance and yet they are so happy because the last Eid, they were under occupation and suffering and this Eid they have nothing but they are free.”
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