Lost daughters and orphaned children: Iraq has become a tragedy everywhere you turn

Lost daughters and orphaned children: Iraq has become a tragedy everywhere you turn

An eyewitness to the country’s misery describes seeing the shattered families and broken homes created by a spiral of death and despair

By Baroness Nicholson in Iraq
6:37PM BST 30 Aug 2014

Sitting across a canvas tent in a refugee camp in northern Iraq, Hanan quietly sobs as she recalls the moment she lost her idyllic family life in a sudden onslaught by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Everything happened at great speed. Two older daughters, both in their late teens, were out in the fields working the land, and the younger two were at home with Hanan.
Shells and rockets began falling and the Isil gunman were rounding up groups of people on the streets.

Neighbours begged Hanan to flee with the two younger teenagers who were with her, and she decided she had no choice. She couldn’t reach the other two and she prayed that they too would escape.


Four years ago Hanan, a bright Yazidi woman in her mid-forties, lost her husand and son in car bombing, and she says she will spend the rest of her life regretting her decision to leave her daughters.
Hanan’s appalling story is just one of the many similar tales I have heard over the past nine days, travelling across northern and central Iraq visiting the aid programmes my charity, the Amar Foundation.

In Baghdad, I met the Um Haider family. During the fighting in Tal Afar, near Mosul, a shell struck their home. One daughter was killed; another, Israa, lost both her legs; a third girl, Omaima, had both legs broken - and a fourth daughter was badly injured by shrapnel and has terrible intestinal wounds.

They received emergency treatment at the time, but now our doctors in Baghdad are looking after them as they begin the long road to recovery.

Sadly they now have to make this journey with only the clothes on their backs and with help given by charities and the Iraqi government.

They have no place to live, no money and no jobs. Just imagine what that must be like.
The conflict has created many orphans. I will never forget 10-year-old Adnan, who was sitting crying in a corner of another refugee camp near Dohuk.

His told me his entire family, Yazidis, had been wiped out by a shell that landed as they fled their homes in Northern Iraq. He was the only survivor in a group that was attacked as they climbed up the side of a mountain.


 ^{A woman holding a child reacts in a military helicopter after being evacuated by Iraqi forces from Amerli (REUTERS)}


Adnan said his mother; father and siblings had been behind him when he heard the explosion. He searched but couldn’t find anyone.

Adnan, like all the others, is now condemned to living as a refugee, certainly for the short term and possibly a great deal longer.

Everywhere you turn in this desperate country, there are refugees struggling to find safety, shelter and food. Near the holy city of Najaf, for example, you can drive for mile after mile where every formally unoccupied building, abandoned caravan, or even wrecked car has refugees living in it.

When I visited the city last week, local authorities told me they estimate 80,000 people are living there. That’s equivalent to the population of a large English town like Bedford. All those people living in one small, desolate, baking hot, miserable area.

The Iraqi government needs help. But as the world knows by now, the government must also help itself. In-fighting between parties and faiths has allowed Isil in. It is time the Iraqis fought back.

In meetings I held with the newly-elected Speaker of Iraq’s parliament, Salim al-Jabouri, and the foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari, both were full of praise for the help organisations such as Amar were giving, but they also realise that the Iraqis themselves must end their ethnic squabbling and fight the common enemy.

The UK and the other Western powers can help though, and they must.
I believe the Prime Minister, David Cameron, was absolutely right when he talked about the Isil advance as a global problem, something not just limited to the Middle East. Isil means business. They want to destroy our values, such as the rule of law, peace, and tolerance. They want a society ruled by fear. They have their own crusade and they have the manpower and money to wage it.

We must also look at the hundreds of young British Muslims who have gone to join the Isil fight. Why and how do we stop them in the future?

We must take a long, deep look at modern Britain and decide as a nation what we want our country to be, with the consent of all our citizens.

Had I been born a Muslim, I would be fighting for the real Islam of peace, culture, science, and the arts.

This week in Najaf, I reflected on the words of the Shrine’s founder, Imam Ali: “The stranger is your brother if he is of your faith, and he is your family member if of a different faith.”

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is Chairman of AMAR International Charitable Foundation (www.amarlondon.org)


But she has just heard that the two girls she left behind in Mosul were captured and have now been sold, presumably as slaves or wives, to Isil fighters.



^{http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11065839/Lost-daughters-and-orphaned-children-Iraq-has-become-a-tragedy-everywhere-you-turn.html}