Al-anwar Newspaper English news in Australia
BBC Radio 5 live has been reporting from Iraq on the stories of women, children and men who have fled from the forces of the so-called Islamic State. Reporter Nick Garnett reflects on his time there.
As Anna Foster, presenter of 5 live Drive, and I sat opposite one another deep into the night editing video and audio, we had a moment of realisation: we had only been in Erbil for 48 hours. It seemed much longer.
In that time we had seen the high level of militarisation that is part and parcel of life in the country and organisational miracles like camps for displaced people that had been built out of the desert in less than a month and were now home to nearly 50,000 people.
We had come across children, living in the areas formerly controlled by IS, who were now starved and close to death.
But we had also seen children being children playing, singing and starting to enjoy being kids again, inquisitive and a bit cheeky, after enduring life under the control of a regime their parents told me had sucked the life out of them.
This was my first view of Iraqi Kurdistan. Even from 43,000 feet up, the patchwork of tents is easy to make out. Regimented and hewn from the desert, these are IDP camps. Home to Internally Displaced People, a clinical phrase for a very human problem.
While we were visiting, the battle for control of Mosul was under way. We were invited to go to the camps that had been rapidly built to cope with the huge numbers of people fleeing the area.
They are refugees in their own country and do not want to go and live elsewhere. They want to stay as close as they can to their homes.
On my first day in the region we drove to a camp in Qayyarah Jeddah, to the east of Mosul.
Charities like Save the Children and Unicef invited Anna and me into the camps to meet the people living there. From a distance you could hear the singing and chanting in the classrooms – they were learning their ABC in English.
I took a picture of a group of girls playing skipping songs in a tent. The sun was low, light was streaming in, close to the ground, through the windows. Time and again I was told that under the watch of IS soldiers, women and girls had to cover themselves all day and night, wearing gloves and full niqab.
In the camp I did not meet any women wearing them, although some wore a veil if they thought they were being photographed.
As I wandered around the camp I realised I was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with a lot of people following me, all wanting their photograph taken. Lots of them made the peace sign, although I had to give them a brief lesson in “which way to hold your fingers”.
