The United Nations urged international powers to ease military operations around the Islamic State’s de facto capital on Thursday amid intensifying concern about the safety of thousands of civilians trapped inside the northern Syrian city.
The rare call to pause hostilities in Raqqa underscored the severity of the humanitarian crisis there. As Islamic State militants use snipers and threats of arrest to prevent residents from fleeing, monitoring groups have blamed U.S.-led coalition forces for hundreds of civilian deaths.
“On Raqqa, our urging today from the U.N. side to the members of the humanitarian task force . . . is that they need to do whatever is possible to make it possible for people to escape Raqqa,” Jan Egeland, senior humanitarian adviser to the United Nations’ special envoy on Syria, told reporters in Geneva.
More than 270,000 people have fled the city since the coalition offensive began, and many of them are stuck in ramshackle camps in the Syrian desert.
As the Islamic State’s most important stronghold, Raqqa became a symbol of the militant group’s ambitions to hold and govern vast swaths of territory. But the infrastructure in the city has crumbled as the Islamic State has comeunder heavy bombardment and its income has dried up as it loses territory elsewhere.
Aid groups estimate that more than 16,000 people remain inside the half of the city still controlled by Islamic State forces, many surviving on paltry supplies of food and little to no electricity.
“Now is the time to think of possibilities, pauses or otherwise, that might facilitate the escape of civilians, knowing that Islamic State fighters are doing their absolute best to use them as human shields,” Egeland said.
In a report released Thursday, Amnesty International described the city as a “deadly labyrinth.”
Displaced Raqqa residents told researchers from the human rights group visiting the surrounding provincethat they had faced Islamic State booby traps and snipers as they fled, as well as artillery attacks and airstrikes by the coalition and its allied Kurdish-led ground force, also known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
Amnesty also documented allegations that Syrian government forces had dropped unguided munitions and cluster bombs close to villages and displacement camps south of the Euphrates River.
“Thousands of civilians are trapped in a deadly labyrinth where they are under fire from all sides,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser. “Knowing that IS use civilians as human shields, SDF and U.S. forces must redouble efforts to protect civilians.”
(c) 2017, The Washington Post · Louisa Loveluck
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