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More than 1 million Iraqis have been forced from their homes by conflict this year, the U.N. refugee agency said Friday -- a number likely only to rise as Islamist militants and Iraqi security forces battle for control, CNN reported.

A humanitarian crisis is brewing, as families who've fled fighting with little more than the clothes on their back seek water, food and shelter from the summer heat.

Meanwhile, the first of up to 300 U.S. military advisers will arrive in Iraq as soon as Saturday, a senior defense official told CNN. This first group from outside Iraq is expected to be very small, the official said.

In addition, some U.S. military personnel already in Iraq at the security cooperation office in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad will be reassigned and become the first of the advisers to go to work, Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said.

An estimated 500,000 people fled Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, last week after it fell to fighters from the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS). On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Iraq put the number who fled Mosul, with its population of 1.6 million, at about 800,000.

Already, a half-million people were displaced from Iraq's western Anbar province, where Sunni militants have been dominant since early this year.