BAJED KANDLA CAMP, Kurdistan Region – Yezidis in the Kurdistan Region feel forgotten by humanitarian organizations and governments, as local and international focus has shifted to the growing number of displaced persons fleeing Mosul to escape the escalating offensive to liberate that besieged city from ISIS.
Over the last year and a half, contributions from major humanitarian organizations and the Mosul governorate have stopped, says Dr. Ahmed Elyas Hassan. The sentiment among the camp is that the major humanitarian organizations such as World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) have deserted Yezidi IDPs and completely refocused their efforts in preparation for those fleeing Mosul.
“I don’t know why the big organizations like UNICEF, which is responsible for education, why did they stop their job here and go to Mosul?” Hassan asked in an interview with Rudaw at the Bajed Kandala Camp for Yezidi internally displaced persons (IDPs).
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UNICEF told Rudaw that in Bajid Kandala, vaccination, nutrition supplementation and rapid nutrition assessment programs have been established. However, the residents claim that these organizations just come to say they are helping but do not deliver in the end.
“It’s not helpful for the camp,” echoed Ayad Khalaf Elias, a 13-year-old resident at the camp. “It’s only good for them. They say ‘I will help you’ but they only help themselves. Why?”
“People in Mosul are getting special treatment, but we need more,” Hassan claimed.
According to Hassan, the greatest challenge is consistently obtaining a sufficient amount of medicine. Since the camp is a closed community, infections and disease run rampant among its residents.
“The camps are a closed community. Many diseases are distributed among them, especially the skin disease, scabies,” Hassan explained. “This appears in a closed community.” To combat contagions in the camp, Hassan and his staff spread awareness and look to work with the department of health from Duhok.
“We do awareness and try to coordinate with another organization, the department of health from Duhok,” Hassan said. “So we get medicine and they get better. But now, the problem is that there is gastritis disease, diarrhea and vomiting. In winter, there are huge cases of bronchitis.”
The medical center is also without a female doctor to tend to women’s needs, an issue highly sensitive in Yezidi culture. “They need a female doctor as well to address women’s issues but cannot afford a salary for one,” Hassan said.
According to Hassan, they give a weekly and monthly report to WHO, which responds that it does not have enough to support all the organizations in Iraq. “They keep saying that they will send support but it’s been two years. Until now, no support.”
“Any family here has two or three people held captive in Daesh (ISIS),” Hassan added. “The people in Mosul are Muslim. Daesh does not decapitate them, does not take their girls.”
However, the WHO office in Duhok was surprised when asked if it had ignored or failed to meet requests. The office said it had not received any requests from Bajid Kandala, saying they “assist based on priority and availability of funds.”
Despite receiving limited contributions, Hassan and others at the camp expressed tremendous appreciation for Joint Help for Kurdistan (JHK), which they say is the only organization providing consistent support for medical assistance.
However, since JHK is an NGO, they do not receive additional help from the Iraqi central government or the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and must rely solely on charitable contributions. Before, JHK was receiving help from donors in Europe, but Hassan claims that that has discontinued as well.
Those who were fortunate to flee ISIS or were smuggled out got their freedom, but have lost everything, including personal savings and identification documents.
“We have no economic support,” Liyla Khalil Ibrahim, a Yezidi survivor of ISIS relayed to Rudaw. “We have to do all the paperwork ourselves for basic things such as identification documents which require us to travel two hours to the nearest office.”
In addition to an under-resourced medical facility and nonexistent support in obtaining identification documents, their school is essentially shut down due to the inability to provide salaries for teachers as well.
According to Hadi Joco, a manager at one school, they have approximately 3,000 children within the camp and only 26 volunteer teachers from the community among them, effectively making the schools impossible to manage.
“It’s just for UNICEF and those big organizations to say that we have a school and children are going to school. They don’t care about the quality or anything,” said Dr. Nemam Ghafouri, a volunteer with JHK.
UNICEF said that the schools in Bajid Kandala are functional and have been upgraded to prefabricated units, which are essentially portable classrooms.
Joco believes that this is “partially true but the other thing is that they are IDPs. They belong to the department of education in Mosul and they (the department of education in Mosul) are supposed to provide them with teachers.”
Joco went to express his frustration in the disparity between teachers provided in Zakho but not Bajed Kandala. “NGOs are coming and going the way they want but the education department in Mosul is obliged to provide us teachers but they don’t. They provide teachers in Zakho where they have plenty of teachers but nobody pays to bring them here.”
Regarding the ongoing operation to liberate Mosul from ISIS, the Yezidis are hoping for a decisive victory for the Peshmerga and Iraqi forces. But they also fear that something as dangerous as ISIS could return again.
“We are hoping that they succeed but it doesn’t change our situation here,” said Nerdis, another survivor who was rescued earlier last month along with her children and chose to keep her last name anonymous. “But we are also afraid of them attacking us again.”
“This is the problem. We have been forgotten even more. We have so many children and we don’t have any money and we don’t know where to go to get some,” Ibrahim said, referring to money needed to pay the ransom to free other Yezidis still kept captive.
“We have said so many times about what happened to us. I don’t know what to say anymore. We have 21 girls still under ISIS. Please help us get back our prisoners. That is our only wish,” Ibrahim pleaded.
Ibrahim was imprisoned by ISIS for close to a year along with her children. She recalled that for the first nine months her family was kept together, but after nine months her husband and sons were separated from her and her daughters.
Ibrahim and her daughters were eventually smuggled out in return for ransom. But she has not seen or heard from her sons and husband since they were separated.
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