"Half million" Iraqi refugees fled violence - VP
28 Apr 2006 16:28:00 GMT
Source: Reuters
NAJAF, Iraq, April 28 (Reuters) - An Iraqi vice president said on Friday 100,000 families -- perhaps some half a million people -- are living as refugees because of sectarian violence wracking the country.
Adel Abdul Mahdi gave no source for his estimate, which is much higher than the 11,000 families -- or about 60,000 people -- which the Displacement and Migration Ministry said two weeks ago had fled their homes since late February.
An aide said Mahdi, the Shi'ite member of Iraq's three-man Presidency Council, was unavailable to clarify the remark, made to reporters during a visit to the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf.
Since the Migration Ministry mainly counts those applying for assistance or places in camps, it seems many refugees have not been included in its figures -- many people have quietly left neighbourhoods to seek shelter with relatives elsewhere.
"We have displaced families, both Sunnis and Shi'ites, and this situation is not acceptable," Mahdi said after a meeting with top Shi'ite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani.
"The refugee problem concerns 100,000 families," he said.
"More than 90 percent of them are Shi'ites," he added -- an assertion somewhat at odds with Migration Ministry figures, which show that at least about a quarter of refugees have gone to Sunni and Kurdish-dominated northern and western provinces.
It was not clear if Mahdi was including in his figure people who may have been made homeless for various reasons before the Feb. 22 bombing of a major Shi'ite shrine in the northern city of Samarra sparked a wave of sectarian killing and migration.
Two weeks ago, the Migration Ministry said it was looking after some 11,000 families -- on average reckoned to number five to six people -- who had fled homes after the Samarra attack.
Of these, 3,600 had moved to Baghdad, where all Iraq's ethnic and sectarian groups are well represented, more than 5,000 had gone to the mainly Shi'ite south and almost 2,500 to the mostly Kurdish and Sunni Arab north and west.
Shi'ites account for about 60 percent of the population by commonly used estimates, with Sunni Arabs and Kurds making up about 20 percent each. Reliable census data is not available.
Shi'ite Prime Minister-designate Nuri al-Maliki is working to form a government of national unity that can staunch the bloodshed. Some fear that the thousands of killings and movement of populations may mean Iraq's national unity is beyond repair.
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