ReliefWeb

1 INTRODUCTION

The Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) is an International Organization for Migration (IOM) information management tool that gathers specific information regarding the status and location of displaced persons across the country.

From the start of January 2014 through 09 April 2015, the DTM identified 2,674,080 internally displaced individuals (445,680 families), dispersed across 3,078 distinct locations in Iraq. This report, therefore, does not include displacement information triggered by the recent clashes in Ramadi district of Anbar, which broke out from 9 April onward. Verified data on the displacement triggered by events in Ramadi will be included in the next DTM round.

Considering available information and the DTM methodology, the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT) maintains the planning figures for the humanitarian response at 2.7 million internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The DTM programme has progressively improved its field assessment activities, while enriching its capacity to capture and represent the multilayered dimensions of the population movements across the country. Two major achievements should be highlighted.

The first cycle of field assessments were launched at the beginning of 2015, the Group Assessment (GA) and revised methodology was successfully completed during a period of three months. Launched at the beginning of 2015, the GA has considerably bolstered IOM’s capacity to identify, collect and verify the location and characteristics of displaced populations across the country. The data collected includes movement intentions, priority needs, district of origin, perception of security at the location of displacement, and SADD (Sex and Age Disaggregated Data) of the displaced populations. A comprehensive DTM quarterly report detailing the findings of these three month field assessments will be released in the following weeks.

As the conflict endures, some previously insecure areas have been liberated allowing for significant populations to leave their area of displacement and return to their place of origin and/or habitual residence. In response to these observed returnee populations, on 27 March DTM launched a monitoring system of returnee tracking to enhance the understanding of the population movements across the country. This mechanism runs parallel to the current DTM system in order to identify and collect baseline data of the populations who decided to permanently move back to their place of origin. While a more comprehensive picture of the return trends will be developed through compounding rounds of assessment allowing for further correlations to be drawn with the displacement dynamics, preliminary findings from this first round are detailed on page 11.