BAGHDAD — Tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians streamed out of Anbar province and the Kurdish capital of Erbil on Sunday morning, packing into cars, minibuses and pickup trucks as strikes near U.S. military installations intensified for a third consecutive day, according to humanitarian officials and local authorities.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration said they were tracking a sharp rise in displacement across western and northern Iraq, driven by fears that Ain al-Asad airbase in Anbar and the U.S. consular and military presence in Erbil could draw further fire as the month-old war between Iran and a U.S.-Israeli coalition widens.

“We are seeing approximately 47,000 individuals displaced in the past 48 hours, with the majority moving from communities adjacent to Ain al-Asad and from neighborhoods on the outskirts of Erbil,” said Hala Mansour, a UNHCR field coordinator based in Baghdad. “These are families who lived through previous rounds of fighting. They are not waiting this time.”

Mansour said the agency had pre-positioned tents, blankets and water purification supplies at three transit sites in Karbala, Najaf and Sulaymaniyah, but warned that capacity would be strained within days if the pace of displacement continued.

The exodus follows a week in which Iranian forces struck a Saudi airbase, wounding at least 12 U.S. service members and bringing the total number of American military personnel wounded since the start of hostilities to more than 300. Houthi fighters in Yemen joined the conflict last week, launching a missile toward Israel that was intercepted, while Emirati and Saudi air defenses shot down a separate volley aimed at gulf targets. Iraqi officials say the geography of the war has placed their country, and especially its U.S.-hosted bases, in an increasingly precarious position.

In Anbar, residents described long lines of vehicles snaking east along the highway toward Ramadi and Baghdad before dawn. Fatima al-Dulaimi, a 38-year-old mother of four from a village roughly nine miles from Ain al-Asad, said she left with her children after a strike rattled windows in their home before sunrise on Saturday.

“My youngest is six. He has not slept for two nights,” al-Dulaimi said by phone from a relative’s apartment in Baghdad’s Adhamiyah district. “We took clothes, documents and the medicine for my mother. Everything else is still in the house. I do not know when we can go back.”

Farther north, families in Erbil’s Ankawa neighborhood, home to a significant Christian population and located near a U.S. consular compound, said they had begun moving toward villages in the Nineveh Plains and across the border into Turkey. Yousef Karim, 52, a shopkeeper who closed his small grocery on Saturday evening, said the decision to leave came after a nearby blast shattered glass along his street.

“We have lived through 2003, through Daesh, through everything,” Karim said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. “But my wife told me, this time we go first, and we ask questions later.”

The Iraqi government issued a formal appeal on Sunday afternoon, calling on all parties to the conflict to spare civilian areas and to facilitate the safe movement of noncombatants. In a statement read on state television, government spokesman Bassim al-Awadi urged international partners to “respect Iraqi sovereignty and the lives of Iraqi families,” and asked U.N. agencies to expand emergency operations in Anbar, Nineveh and the Kurdistan Region.

Iraqi officials have privately pressed Washington to consider relocating some logistical functions away from densely populated areas, two senior advisers to the prime minister said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive deliberations. U.S. defense officials in the region declined to comment on operational matters.

At the U.N. country office in Baghdad, Resident Coordinator Mariana Velasquez said the world body was coordinating with Iraqi ministries, the Kurdistan Regional Government and partner agencies to scale up shelter, medical care and cash assistance.

“Displacement of this scale, occurring within a 48-hour window, places enormous strain on host communities that are themselves recovering from previous conflicts,” Velasquez said. She added that schools in several provinces had been designated as temporary reception centers and that mobile health units were being dispatched to assess needs among arriving families, particularly pregnant women, the elderly and children with chronic conditions.

The IOM said its tracking matrix showed the largest concentrations of new arrivals in Baghdad governorate, followed by Karbala, Sulaymaniyah and Duhok. The agency cautioned that figures were preliminary and likely to rise as assessment teams reached more remote areas.

Aid groups warned that the displacement was beginning to overlap with humanitarian shipments routed through Iraq to support populations affected by the broader regional war, including civilians inside Iran and along the Saudi and Emirati borders. Convoys of medical supplies and food aid have moved through Iraqi territory in recent weeks, and officials said competing demands on warehouses and trucking capacity could complicate the response.

In Islamabad, where Turkish-facilitated talks among regional and international parties entered a second week, Iraqi diplomats have proposed the establishment of humanitarian corridors to allow safe passage for civilians out of conflict-affected areas and unimpeded delivery of aid, according to a person briefed on the discussions. The proposal, the person said, has drawn cautious interest from several delegations but has not yet been formally adopted.

For families on the road, the diplomatic conversations felt distant. Back in Adhamiyah, al-Dulaimi said she had spoken briefly with neighbors who stayed behind in Anbar. Most were elderly, she said, or owned livestock they could not transport.

“They told me the sky was quiet this morning,” she said. “But quiet does not last.”