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.