Hopeless and hungry on the streets of Erbil

ERBIL, Kurdistan – Ten-year-old Khalid Mohammad studies his family members intently before strapping a fanny pack to his tiny waist and joining them in the street. He wasn’t headed to school. It was his first day on the job. 

Mohammad is one of 700,000 children who, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), missed the entire 2014-215 school year. The organization estimates that 3 million children will be out of school this year. 

Mohammad and his family are refugees from Mosul, the stronghold of the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, that has been occupied by the terror group since last year. They are part of the nearly 2 million displaced people who have arrived in the Kurdistan region since ISIS began its onslaught more than a year ago. 

The influx has exacerbated economic and political woes in the region, stretching already thin public services past capacity. For refugees like Mohammad, school is a luxury he can hardly afford. 

“The police always ask me, ‘Why are you out here?’” said Mohammad’s cousin Iram Hassan, 15,  at a main thoroughfare in the Kurdistan region’s capital of Erbil late on a weeknight. His greasy hair and sweat-stained, plaid shirt evidenced a long day of working in 110 degree heat. 

“And I tell them there are no other jobs. What do you want me to do?”
 
The government and humanitarian community say this pattern is breeding long-term hardship in a region that has already been devastated by terror.
 
“We all know that when children don’t have access to school, when children don’t have access to learning, what results is a lost generation of children for the country,” said Karim Elkorany, external relations officer for UNICEF in Iraq. “Boys who don’t have access to learning as teenagers become much more vulnerable to recruitment by armed groups.”
 
“The situation of education in Iraq is dire,” Elkorany said.

For example, more than 400 children in Harsham Camp, located on the outskirts of Erbil, are going without school this year. Social workers at the camp said they are hoping to open a school in the camp by the end of October, but that depends on funding.
 
UNICEF and the aid groups have built more than 70 schools in the last year, Elkorany said. But this is hardly enough to help the millions of children who still lack access to proper education.

Nongovernmental organizations are desperately implementing tent schools and caravan schools to accommodate the kids, but there is another, perhaps more disturbing problem: many kids who do have access to learning do not have the desire.

“In Iraq, up to 1.5 million kids have difficulty accessing education services consistently. If they miss out on one or two years of education, this decreases the chance they will ever go back to school,” said Jeffrey Bates, chief of communications for UNICEF in Iraq.

Hassan and his group of friends and relatives, ranging in age from 6 to 16 years old, all said they quit school because they needed to make money and none of them expressed desire to return. For four months they have been shuffling through intersections with phone cards and spray bottles in tow.
 
“My father was killed in Mosul,” Hassan said as he flipped through the day’s earnings. Less than 15,000 Iraqi dinar, or about $13. A decent day, he said.

The rest of Hassan’s family fled from their home when ISIS swept the city. 

“My father was a Peshmerga,” the boy said.  “I have to provide for my family now.”
  
Rasha Abdulrahman, a 27-year-old woman working near Ainkawa not far from Hassan’s group, said if she’s lucky, passersby will feed her and her four young children.
 
The Syrian refugee is seven months pregnant and has only one worry: what will happen when she is forced to rest before and after giving birth.
 
“I stay hungry sometimes to afford rent,” she said. “We can’t afford housing because it’s too expensive.”
 
She fled from Kobani to Kurdistan, where life has been a struggle. Her husband is paralyzed and unable to work, she said, so she sells packets of gum on the street from 7 a.m. to midnight each day of the week.
 
“I feel bad bringing my kids out here, but that’s all I can do,” she said.

As each day on the streets passes, the chances of the children receiving an education grow slimmer, and the future of the country looks bleaker.

“The scale of the crisis, the way in which it expands and changes every day is daunting, but we are optimistic we can work for a brighter future for children in Iraq,” Elkorany said.

Meanwhile, families and children in Kurdistan work on the streets each day scraping together enough money to make it to tomorrow.

Back at the Erbil intersection, Hassan looked on with pride and quiet worry as young Mohammad took to his work like a natural, gracefully dodging cars and peddling phone cards to motorists stopped at the red light.

“We want to find jobs where we can live with dignity,” Hassan said, looking down.