UNITED NATIONS: The UN refugee agency has appealed for additional funds from international community to meet the challenge of recent internal displacements across Iraq and Syria as they prepare for a long and cold winter.

“The shortfall affects our winter preparedness programmes, although we have already invested $154 million on winter aid for Syrian and Iraqi refugees and internally displaced, and means that UNHCR is having to make some very tough choices over who to prioritise,” the agency’s spokesperson, Melissa Fleming, told reporters in Geneva.

Ms Fleming said that because of a current $58.4 million shortfall, the UNHCR was focusing on a specific set of criteria to determine which refugees would immediately benefit from the agency’s resources.

Factors such as the elevation of refugee settlements, the presence of children or households headed by women, family health concerns, new arrivals, available family resources, and shelter conditions would all be taken into consideration.Over the past several months, Iraq has been convulsed by increasing instability amid an ongoing offensive by the Islamic State and its affiliates, unleashing wave after wave of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees.

Since January 2014, an estimated 1.9 million people have been displaced across Iraq as they fled the violence and persecution of ISIS’s recent offensives. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), close to 50 per cent of the displaced have found refuge in the high altitude areas of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, where winter temperatures can plummet to well-below zero. Hundreds of thousands have found temporary shelter in unfinished buildings, informal settlements, or overwhelmed public structures, as well as in the open air.

In Syria, meanwhile, the ongoing civil war continues to displace civilians, fuelling an increase in the need for winter aid, with priority areas for distribution of thermal blankets and winter clothing being the besieged city of Aleppo and northern parts of the country as they are the coldest.

Published in Dawn, November 12th, 2014