Thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled from towns near Mosul this week, amid fighting in the region between security forces and an al-Qaeda splinter group, a senior cleric from the city said.

Many of the refugees have escaped to Kurdish-controlled cities including Erbil, Emile Shimoun Nona, the Chaldean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, said in a phone interview from Iraqi Kurdistan late yesterday. He said most of the Christians in Mosul itself, who amounted to about 1,200 families, had escaped earlier after the city fell to fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant on June 10.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said in a statement today that 10,000 Iraqis had fled from Christian regions into Kurdistan after mortar rounds landed near their town. Nona said he estimated as many as 50,000 Christians have left their homes, about 90 percent of them from the town of Hamdaniya near Mosul.