The Iraqi government has announced that it has launched an "emergency plan" to provide shelter for tens of thousands of displaced people who had been living for years in refugee camps that Baghdad authorities decided to close in October.

Iraqi media gave prominence on Monday to the announcement of the "emergency plan" by the ministry for migrants and displaced people in order to resettle thousands of civilians who were forced to leave their homes following the arrival of ISIS in 2014.

After last month's closure of the camps, these people were left without shelter for the winter.

The time frame and the operational details of this plan, however, have not yet been revealed.

A commission to prepare an emergency plan

The closure of the refugee camps to the north of Baghdad forced tens of thousands of people to crowd into the outskirts of towns and cities of an Iraq afflicted by a prolonged economic crisis that has been aggravated by the pandemic.

Social tensions have become more intense in this situation and conflicts between communities have broken out.

A series of armed clashes between host communities and displaced people in the governorates of Kirkuk and Saladin, to the north of Baghdad, led the authorities to create a commission to prepare an emergency plan to resettle the tens of thousands of civilians.

Humanitarian organizations sound the alarm

In recent weeks humanitarian organizations have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the closure of the camps for the displaced in Iraq without an adequate response to the needs of these vulnerable people.

In the middle of November the UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, announced it was increasing its support for the Iraqi internally displaced people returning to their cities and villages in an attempt to mitigate some of the negative effects of the closures, which took place without adequate warning and without consulting the representatives of the internally displaced people and the humanitarian agencies that worked in the camps.

A few days ago Save the Children reported that thousands of children and their families are having to live in seriously damaged homes in abandoned areas, amid unexploded bombs, corpses and rubble, after the sudden closure of several camps for the displaced.