Reports of refugees fleeing al-Tash camp

There are concerns for some 1,400 refugees who have reportedly fled from the al-Tash camp in central Iraq following recent fighting around the city of Ramadi, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told IRIN on Wednesday. The camp, which recently hosted some 4,200 Iranian Kurds, is located in the area of Ramadi, roughly 110 km from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, and near the city of Fallujah, which has been under attack by US-led troops for over two weeks since Iraqi Prime Minister, Iyad Allwai, gave the go-ahead for a major offensive to flush out insurgents there. "This is linked with the conflicts in Fallujah and in Ramadi. The camp is not very far from Ramadi," Mohammed Adar, officer in charge for UNHCR’s Iraq office, told IRIN from the Jordanian capital, Amman, expressing concern over the locations of the refugees. "We are also worried for the people remaining in the camp," Adar said. He added that Iraqi Kurds in the area were also leaving and noted that 300 families had recently arrived in Sulaymaniyah, northern Iraq. The UNHCR official explained that some local services, such as water and electricity, had been cut off and that the delivery of food had become difficult due to insecurity in the area. "We understand that the police checkpoint at the camp was attacked," he said, adding that their partners in Iraq were having access problems to the camp as the road was too dangerous. "Most of them are not taking their furniture and belongings. That means that they [the refugees] made a very hasty exit from the camp," Adar asserted. And, according to UNHCR's partners in the field, 30 to 35 percent of the camp's population fled al-Tash late last week, he added. The camp was established under the former government in the mid-1980s to gather the Iranian ethnic Kurds in the country in one place. It houses Iranians who left their country after the fall of the Shah – the former king of Iran - in 1979, and during the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war. "We understand that some families left for Sulaymaniyah in the north. Since they are ethnically Kurds, they are trying to reach their friends and relatives there," he said. Meanwhile, through its partners, the UN refugee agency is attempting to reach those arriving in the north in order to find out when they left the al-Tash camp and what the circumstances of their departure were. However, the UNHCR official noted that there were many groups of refugees scattered in the country. "Another possibility was that people had gone to no-man's land [on the Jordanian-Iraqi border]. Our regional office is investigating and we have no information so far on whether there are any arrivals there. But we are monitoring the situation carefully," Adar said. He added that if this turned out to be the case, UNHCR was ready to receive new refugees, although he noted that as winter was coming and weather conditions would be difficult in no-man's land, many of them could have opted to go to northern Iraq.