IRBIL, Iraq (AP) – They line up daily by the dozens in the breezy courtyard of a mosque just outside the Iraqi city of Irbil’s main bazaar – displaced people from across Iraq, hoping for a hot meal.
Volunteers at the Shrine of Sheikh Chouli in the Kurdish regional capital boil chicken and rice in metal pans the size of truck wheels and spoon them into buckets and bowls. All are served, including internal refugees from elsewhere in Iraq, Bangladeshi street cleaners and even some local residents who believe the food is blessed.
But the displaced have swelled their ranks. Before the Islamic State group swept across northern and western Iraq in 2014, around 100 people would line up for food each morning. Since then the number has tripled.
With U.N. agencies and other aid groups struggling to cope with the worst refugee crisis since World War II, many of the displaced have come to rely on local charities like this one, which has been aiding the poor since the time of Sheikh Mohammed Othman al-Naqshabandi, a 19th century Sufi saint entombed here, who is popularly known as Sheikh Chouli.
Abdul-Jabar Mohammed, a 50-year-old with asthma who fled from the city of Falluja, several hundred miles to the south, walks three miles every day from the house his family rents on the outskirts of Irbil to the shrine.