New camp offers permanence for displaced Syrians in Arbat

D. Morrow
31 October 2014
Arbat refugee camp

For the Syrian Kurds living in Arbat refugee camp, this winter is going to be different. Arbat has been home to many of them for over two years. But finally, the camp has moved to the more permanent base UNHCR has been working on for months. Despite the muddy tracks created from recent autumn thunderstorms, the cinder block buildings and lanes indicate this camp will be a permanent space for displaced Syrians. The old camp, located closer to the town of Arbat, is now a transit camp for internally displaced Iraqis. 

Many of the people in this new camp are taking the opportunity to personalize their spaces. A few of newly built structures had decorated fronts, and other small shops and stands have been set up across the camp. 

The people here share the same space, but the geographical and ethnic divisions between them are mimicked in the camp set up, with different ethnic groups or towns clustering to different areas. Recent arrivals from Kobani, according to one Syrian refugee from Damascus, apparently complained of the state of the camp, and are attempting to stay within Sulaimani’s city limits instead. 

With winter coming however, this camp is a marked step up from the tents of the transit camp, though the rivers of mud are likely to only get worse with the weather. 

Cultural Center in Sulaimani bridges generational and geographical differences

D. Morrow
14 October 2014
Sulaimani

Deep in the heart of the Sulaimani bazaar, tucked up a narrow staircase, is the Save the Children Kurdistan Cultural Center. Located in a converted municipal building, the space is bright and quiet, with old newspapers and magazines lining quiet reading alcoves framed with stained glass. The center is, “a bridge between younger and older generations,” says Senior Research Officer Lydia Shaswar, who has been working with Kurdistan Save the Children for decades. 

Originally designed, with the neighboring children’s center, as a safe space for street kids to participate in educational extra-curricular activities, the center has grown as Kurdistan has changed. Lydia remarked on the parallel between Kurdistan in the early 90s and today, with the influx of displaced families and refugees subtly having an impact on the city. 

What is essential, Lydia believes, is creating long-term programming to assist children growing up in the heart of the bazaar. While immediate relief is important, there must more durable solutions for children living here. Since the fall of Mosul in June, the Cultural Center has noticed an increase in the number of families from outside of Sulaimani finding refuge in the bazaar. The Cultural Center invites all displaced families for a free meal and long-term use of the facilities.

The children’s center, located across a narrow alleyway from the Cultural Center, is a large, bright building that caters to up to 150 children from age six to 14 regularly. Though it aims to attract vulnerable children and those living on the street, the center’s activities and programming are open to all children. School had just begun on the day we visited, so the wide hallways were empty, but bright paintings, drawings, sculptures and other art works lines all of the walls and rooms. A large theatre area puts on productions, and the music and drum rooms feature traditional instruments like hand drums and flutes in addition to pianos and keyboards. 

The Cultural Center does outreach at Arbat Refugee Camp and is currently working on a center in the Raparin area of Sulaimani that is specifically for children with special needs, something that is sorely lacking in this part of Kurdistan.

In the meantime, the center is a quiet refuge is an otherwise busy bazaar, and a small haven to reflect and read and learn, and for different generations to share their experiences through art. “This is the real Suli,” says Lydia. 

Children find solace in art in Akre refugee camp

D. Morrow

9 October 2014

Akre

As unlikely as an old prison might be a source of refuge for displaced people, the converted barracks at Akre now provide safety and security for about 1,500 Syrian refugees, many of whom have been here for over a year.

Rise Foundation’s Castle Art project allows children in the camp to take control of their situation and find solace through art projects, specifically in the creation of murals on the interior walls of the camp. Since they started working here over a year ago, they have managed to complete a full quarter of the walls, now decorated with bright colors and images that remind the children who design them of home and family, among other themes. The completed walls are a stark contrast to the unfinished, unpainted parts of the compound, where families hang rugs, or small shops have been set up.

On the day I visited, the mural project was on a brief hiatus and children were working on decorating a playground located just outside the walls of the structure. The playground has been rejuvenated thanks to collaboration with local welders and builders, and now Rise is working with the children in the camp to put fresh white paint on the low walls around the space, and decorate the panels.

Children worked together to design images of cartoon characters and animals, and then, under the direction of one of the teachers and an artist from the camp, apply their designs onto the walls. 

The Castle Art project is successful because it allows the children to maintain their agency while fostering creativity. So far, the children working through Rise’s project have managed to transform what would have been a bleak, desperate space into something that reflects the brightness and hope of the people who live there. 

Landmine survivors require long-term support

D. Morrow

8 October 2014

Duhok

When it comes to vulnerable groups in the face of recent conflict, our immediate thoughts are of the religious and ethnic minorities displaced by the advance of Da’esh militants. But injured survivors of conflict have long-term needs that often go unfulfilled. 

“When people lose a body part, something psychological happens,” says Omer Hassan, who lost his left leg in a landmine accident over 20 years ago. “There is no good training, no good place, no safe spaces for handicapped people.”

There are literally millions of landmines contaminating Kurdistan’s countryside from a series of wars, and they are having a serious impact on the life of people living here. There have been over 30,000 confirmed landmine casualties by the end of the 2013 according to the Landmine Monitor. But the numbers hide the larger impact, which is that people who survive incidents with landmines must live the rest of their life with the consequences.

In 1992, Omer was a peshmerga mine clearance volunteer, working mainly in the area near his town on the Iranian border. Voluntary peshmerga at that time were given a brief training course on how to disarm landmines, and taught basic patterns that mines would be laid in. One Friday morning, two months into his work, he took a step sideways into an area he thought was safe, heard a bang, saw the smoke, and wondered who had set off the explosive. It wasn’t until he looked down and saw his leg that he realized it was himself. 

“That was the end of life for me,” he says, looking back, “I can’t walk, swim, I can’t help again, I can’t remove mines.” In addition to the loss of his leg, “there was no job, no work. I was on the street.”

But Omer slowly took back control of his own life. He began selling cigarettes on the street, and then built himself his first prosthetic out of an aluminum milk can and some cotton. When he took his first steps again he said, “At that time, I didn’t feel any pain. I can walk.” 

When Mines Advisory Group (MAG) first arrived in Kurdistan in 1993, they sought out the men who had been voluntary peshmerga deminers. Omer was offered a position and soon became a team leader. He worked for MAG for 23 years, and in the last two has switched over to commercial clearance with Sterling Global. Despite, or perhaps through his injury so long ago, he has found purpose, and success. 

There are three things handicapped people in Kurdistan need to be successful, he suggests. The first and most important of these is a job – having a focus on something other than your injury is the first step towards healing. Secondly, people need to be able to afford their medication, so landmine survivors require better salaries and support in their workplace. Finally, Omer hopes that landmine survivors and other people with mobility issues will have access to sport support, so they exercise and stay healthy in a safe space, with access to the prosthetics they need to partake in these activities. “My dream is to swim in the river,” he says. 

Iraq and Kurdistan are working hard to fulfill their clearance obligations according to their ratification of the Mine Ban Treaty in 2007, but just as important are their obligations to improve the quality of life of landmine survivors, and that will have just as important an impact on the future of the country, after the violence has ended.

Displaced Yezidis seek shelter in Duhok schools

D. Morrow

3 October 2014

Duhok

For 1500 Yezidi people from Shingal (Mt. Sinjar), a large school in Duhok has become a welcome refuge. The afternoon I walk past, a few children are playing outside with their parents. Asking where they’re from, I am immediately invited in, and soon have a crowd of small children following me. 

The displaced people are well settled in here. The balconies of the school are hanging with laundry (the easiest way to spot the unlikely new homes of displaced people in the region), and outside a few people are lounging on blankets brought to the porch. Inside, every room of the school is packed. There are at least a hundred children, chasing each other down the wide hallways that should be filled with students, but now are divided into small little rooms. People have used laundry baskets, cartons of clothing and blankets to build low walls behind which families are merited some level of privacy. In many corners, babies are sleeping in small boxes, draped carefully with fine mesh to keep away the insects. 

These people were trapped on Mt. Sinjar for twenty days in August, during the campaign that finally brought the humanitarian catastrophe happening in northern Iraq to the international stage. 

“There was no water, no food,” a young woman named Ahazal recalls. She speaks a little English, and doggedly tries to explain what happened on Sinjar, while an audience of a few dozen curious family members and neighbours look on. “Da’esh killed people,” she says, “Killed my friends, killing babies, everything.” 

It is difficult to imagine exactly what the people here have born witness to and experienced in the last two months. Despite being safe in Duhok now, they, like so many others, do not know what will happen next, or when they can go back home. “The Islamists stay in Shingal now,” says Ahazal. “Everything happened because of them.” 

She cannot explain to me how many people were left behind, exactly what happened in those twenty days, or how they escaped the mountain, but there is obvious relief that they have found safety in Duhok and are no longer hungry. 

Though the school offers refuge, it is unclear whether the students who usually attend classes here have been relocated, or are simply having a long-delayed start to the year. The Duhok governorate has been supporting its visitors to the best of its abilities but as the months drag on, it is clear that something more long-term must be arranged as soon as possible for the displaced people in the city, for whom refugee camps are not an option. 

Mountain villagers live with dangers from decades-old landmine threat

D. Morrow

2 October 2014

Choman

The road between Rawanduz and Choman – high in the eastern mountains, winding its way to Kurdistan’s Iranian border – is as spectacular as it is dangerous. It’s not because of Western fears of Iran or PKK strongholds, and Da’esh is nowhere near this quiet pocket of the country. There is something else here that villagers are threatened by on a daily basis: the lasting legacy of landmines. 

Villagers have been farming the upper slopes of Iraq’s highest mountain, Holgard, for generations. But since the Iran-Iraq War their livelihood has become significantly more dangerous. That’s because anti-personnel (AP) landmines left behind, scattered over the fields and slopes of these quiet mountains, do not follow the same rules of war as treaties or ceasefires. The cool, windy slopes of this particular mountain were mined in the 1980s by Iran and Iraq soldiers, and thirty years later their presence is still a constant source of danger to the people living here.

At the end of September, the villagers here are starting to begin their plans to move down into the valley where they will spend the winter. They live in makeshift shelters during the summer months on the side of the mountain, usually simple wooden frames that are tightly tied with tarps and blankets. The nights are cold up here. Even though it is the end of the season, the last of the summer’s tomatoes still wind across the ground, giving the odd impression that certain swathes of the mountainside have turned bright red. 

This area is currently being cleared of landmines in order to create a protected national park. Demining teams have been working up here for over a year now, and despite their efficiency, that have only begun to make a dent in the threat. People here have been clearing bits and pieces of the land on their own though for almost two decades, since their return in the late 90s post-war. Some of the tomato fields they return to year after year sit in the middle of massive mine fields, and nothing but a general knowledge of the area keeps them safe. Every spring though, the ground changes with melting snow, and new dangers emerge.

The landmine threat may not be as current or television-worthy as the violence happening on Kurdistan’s Syrian border, but it is a daily threat to people living up here in the mountains – and indeed, across the whole country. And with the majority of the country’s resources going towards facing and fighting Da’esh, it’s important to remember that danger doesn’t end with war, but that its legacy can affect civilians for generations after. 

IDPs in Duhok find safety, but need supplies

D. Morrow
1 October 2014
Duhok

You realize as soon as you arrive in Duhok that things here have changed. As you drive down the brand new road into the valley that holds the city, you notice immediately that there are new residents here.

Concrete-framed, half-built apartment buildings are suddenly full of colour, from the tarps and laundry that hang from the bottom few floors. We pass under a bridge and see a number of families squatting with more tarps, small stoves, and tents. The most unlikely place set up camp, and yet, I suppose, an obvious one.

The number of internally displaced people currently living in Duhok is reaching a breaking point. Some estimates put the number of people who have come here equal to the number of actual residents. The streets are full, the schools are full, and the nights are getting colder.

At one school, an older man sat on the stairs, watching the street. He tells us that the families living in this place come mostly from Mosul and Sinjar. They fled when they saw rockets being fired towards them, and have been living in Duhok for two months. “Thousands and thousands of us,” the old man tells me, “and we had no food, no water, we have so many babies…”

Duhok is much better, the boys beside him agree. The Duhok governorate is currently providing food, water and clothes to the people who need it here, and there are enough other families throughout the city that in some way, they are able to form a community here, to feel safe. “It’s not the same,” says the old man, but it will do until they can return home – something they all wish for fervently.

In the meantime, there is not much to do. There is no school for the children, not even any books to read. The boys tell me though, with some pride, that there is a football field attached to the school. I ask if they play and they glance at each other. The field is the first thing, but no one has a ball.