CPTnet
16 July 2009
IRAQ: Severed from Land, Life, and Home, Part II, “What Kind of Life is this?”

Along the northeastern border of Iraq, CPT has been working to amplify the voices of 137 Iraqi Kurdish families from the Pshdar District who are currently living in the Zharawa Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camp, because Iran and Turkey bombed their villages.  Both governments accuse the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) of allowing PKK and sympathizers to occupy these villages and therefore claim their militaries have the right to trespass into sovereign Iraqi territory.  Additionally, the U.S. has given military intelligence to Turkey and sits on a trilateral military commission with Turkey and Iraq Central Government to plan military engagements with the PKK.  

Rows of UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees) tents in the camp are crowded together and backed up against toilets and showers.  Temperatures have already exceeded 100 degree Fahrenheit and will only increase in the coming months.  There is not one tree or structure to provide shade.  The IDPs have no electricity to refrigerate food and get their water from tanks brought in by the UNHCR.

“We once lived in paradise.  We had everything in our villages; grain, orchards, vegetables, animals.  Our water came down from the mountains and was clear, clean and cold,” Mr. Babaqir told CPT.  “During the years of the economic sanctions, we grew food for ourselves and for the people in the cities who were not able to grow their food.”

Mrs. Aman Ali recalled the days when families lived together in the villages.  “I would go out to the orchards early in the morning and pick the fruits and vegetables until I heard the noon call to prayer.  Then the family would gather, eat, and talk.  We were happy and grateful to God,” she continued.  “Now, we are separated.  Some family members crowd into cheap rented houses in town so that our children might be able to finish school.  Others work as shepherds far away, so that we might have a little money to live on.  The rest of us are here at the camp.  What kind of life is this?” she asked as tears streamed down her face.  

Abdul Rakhman teaches Arabic in a nearby high school and his sister, Miss Taban, is the camp nurse.  They told CPTers, “Our children are traumatized.  If they continue to live like this, they will be stunted.  Their health suffers as does their minds and their hearts.  When the children lived in the village, they were rarely sick.”

The children drew pictures both of their life in the village and in the tent camp.  Some pictures were of stick-figured children with smiling faces standing next to rows of houses surrounded by trees filled with apples.  Rows of tents, devoid of children or flowers, appeared in their other pictures.

The boys played soccer on a hot, dry, dusty field.  The girls sang songs and modeled sunglasses.  They appeared to do the things that all children do, but their eyes are deep, distant, filled with sorrow and with fear.