Region | Iraq
Displacement has taken heavy toll on Iraqi families
The killers were on the way, and Ahmad Hassan had only a few hours to save his family.
- AP
- Published: 00:30 March 17, 2008
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Baghdad: The killers were on the way, and Ahmad Hassan had only a few hours to save his family.
On this day, August 6, 2006, at least 22 Iraqis would die in rising sectarian violence. Hassan, his wife and their children would survive, but at a cost: They would lose their home, and flee their neighbourhood.
Nineteen months later, they remain exiled in their own country.
"I do not want to return to my house for the time being because I already lost my house and I do not want to lose my life," Hassan says, his infant twins in his arms.
More than 4 million Iraqi lives are in similar straits - upended by five years of war that has turned neighbourhoods into killing fields and sent countless refugee convoys scurrying for the border.
About 2 million people have fled to other countries since the 2003 US-led invasion, mostly to Arab neighbours such as Jordan and Syria, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Another 2.4 million people have been displaced but are still in Iraq, some forced out during Saddam Hussain's rule and others since the start of the war in March 2003.
A 2007 year-end report by the International Organisation for Migration found that most internally displaced Iraqis left home because of direct threats to their lives.
Despite improved security here over the last half-year, attempts to allow people to return are in the earliest stages. Simple homelessness doesn't fully describe the problem.
"It affects every aspect of someone's life," said Karim Khalil, who analyses the Iraq situation for the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. "Access to food, and documentation, access to education, access to health and legal services. There are a whole panoply of issues."
Hassan is part of Iraq's Shiite majority, but members of all of Iraq's ethnic groups have been thrust from their homes.
Hassan, his wife and their four young children lived in two-story home they'd inherited from Hassan's father.
Shiites and Sunnis lived side-by-side in the middle-class area until waves of sectarian violence spread across the country after the bombing of a Shiite shrine in February 2006.
Around that time, Hassan joined in a procession to commemorate the seventh-century martyrdom of Imam Hussain, a revered Shiite figure. It was enough to earn him a death sentence. Sunni neighbours tipped him on August 6 that insurgents were on the way to his house to kill Hassan for joining in the ritual.
One of those friends volunteered to hide the family. Then, in the afternoon, gunmen arrived outside their house. When they couldn't find Hassan they became enraged, and burned the building down. The family savings, all in cash, were in the house. Gone.
Where to go now? What to do? Relatives could help for a little while but Hassan and his family needed a place to stay permanently, not just a stopgap. Where they landed is Sadr City, a huge, Shiite slum on Baghdad's east side.
There, the family was able to get a small, old house - just two Dickensian rooms.
If anything, their plight gets more difficult.
Forty-year-old Hassan and his wife, Amal Jasem, now have six mouths to feed. In addition to their four older children, now ages 3 to 8, the couple last October welcomed the twins - a boy and a girl named Hassan and Zainab. Each suffers from tuberculosis.
There is no heating source in the house, and Hassan cannot afford to buy kerosene to fuel the stove.
The babies' medical care is draining the family budget, as is electricity - in the form of their contribution to a neighbourhood generator.
"I depend heavily on the charity of people and organisation to ensure the survival of my family," said Hassan, a diabetic, who has received aid from a group that roughly translates as the Supporters of Rightness Charity Association.
Ali Mouhan's family also goes to bed hungry.
Mouhan, his wife and their five children were forced out of Sunni Abu Ghraib area in 2006. As the family was leaving, gunmen opened fire on their car, killing the Shiite couple's 9-year old daughter.
They, too, wound up in Sadr City. Dinner is often nonexistent these days, and lunch is only fried tomato and bread. Mouhan is jobless; his wife works as a police officer.
"Life has become very difficult for us since we left our house," Mouhan said. "We have been turned into beggars." Like Hassan, Mouhan suffers from a life-threatening disease - his is cancer.
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