Fallujah refugees: Daesh uses food to enlist fighters

Iraqis who fled Daesh-held Fallujah as government and allied forces advanced on the city said they had survived on stale dates and the terrorists were using food to enlist fighters whose relatives were going hungry.
The extremists have kept a close guard on food storage in the besieged city near Baghdad that they captured in January 2014, six months before they declared a caliphate across large parts of Iraq and Syria.
The terrorists visited families regularly after food ran short with offers of supplies for those who enlisted, said 23-year-old Hanaa Mahdi Fayadh from Sijir on the northeastern outskirts of Falluja.
“They told our neighbor they would give him a sack of flour if his son joined them; he refused and when they had gone, he fled with his family,” she said.
“We left because there was no food or wood to make fires, besides, the shelling was very close to our house.”
She and others interviewed in a school transformed into a refugee center in Garma, a town under government control east of Fallujah, said they had no money to buy food from the group. The Iraqi government stopped paying the salaries of employees there and in other cities under Daesh control a year ago to stop the group seizing the funds.
Fayadh escaped Sijir on May 27, four days after the government offensive on Fallujah. Of the 1,500 displaced people who found refuge in the school in Garma were women and children, because the army takes men for screening over possible ties with Daesh.

Source ; Arab News