A humanitarian catastrophe is looming over northern Iraq. As many as a million people are expected to stream out of Mosul when Iraqi government forces, backed by the United States, move to retake the city from isis, which took control two years ago. The much anticipated military operation could begin as early as next month, but aid workers here say they do not have anywhere near the resources, money, or manpower to deal with the expected human tide.

“It’s a nightmare—a disaster heading our way,’’ Alex Milutinovic, the director of the International Rescue Committee in Erbil, told me. “The Iraqi government is determined to destroy ISIS, but it is impossible to accommodate the number of refugees the military operation is going to produce.”

The Iraqi and American governments have been planning to retake Mosul since isis invaded the country and captured the city, in 2014. The reasons for doing so are obvious and urgent: the people of Mosul are being held hostage by violent fanatics; last month, according to the Iraq Oil Report, which has correspondents inside the city, ISIS agents arrested ninety people on charges of spying for the Iraqi government and executed sixty of them.

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Here, lying in a stained carton, are notes on a refugee camp in Tanzania, where surviving Tutsis and their Hutu enemies lived side by side in blue tarp tents. It is 1994. The notes record that there are people everywhere, milling and moving in short parades on the main path in the camp, hastily constructed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Women wear colorful cloths, khangas, and carry yellow plastic containers of water on their heads. Children and old men push up against one another, as if at a bargain sale. They hold portable radios to their ears. A man in a brown rain hat drags a reluctant goat by a rope. White smoke mixes with the smells of fresh earth and excrement. At an outdoor butcher shop, a cow’s bloodied horn lies beside the animal’s astonished head. I greet a group of young Hutus in French. “Did you participate in the killings?,” I ask. “We did nothing,” one says. “Did you see others do the killing?” He says, “We saw nothing.” I ask, “How many Tutsis are left in Rwanda, do you think?” A teenage boy wearing a green baseball cap grins, and slowly draws the side of his index finger across his throat.

Here are several photos of and notes on Divis Flats, a Catholic neighborhood, or stronghold, in Belfast. It is 1981. Coiled barbed wire runs atop a long gray wall on which is written smash h-block, a reference to the British prison in which members of the Irish Republican Army are held. Windows are pockmarked with bullet holes and display black flags of mourning for hunger strikers. Rats skitter in huge sewage pits, soggy with rain. Glass chips cover streets that are interrupted by “dragon’s teeth,” huge blocks of stone set out by the British army in uneven rows to prevent fast getaways. The presence of a stranger in the area is scrutinized, my every step tracked by a huddle of teenage boys with grim, bold faces, loitering beside a fire-blackened car. It is essential not to look British. The week before my arrival, a CBS reporter was stabbed at this same spot because he made the mistake of wearing a Burberry coat.

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