The Pigeon Boy
And Other Fugitives from ISIS
By Robin Wright
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-pigeon-boy-and-other-forgotten-fugitives-from-isis
And Other Fugitives from ISIS
By Robin Wright
Mohammed
Hussein, a six-year-old Iraqi boy, was born with a condition known as glanular hypospadias,
in which the opening for the urethra is not in its usual place at the tip of
the penis. When his father, Saad Hussein, pulled the child’s trousers down to
show me, his mother and five sisters seemed unsurprised. Need had long ago
superseded modesty. We were clustered together on the floor of a small tent in
Baharka, a camp outside Erbil, in northern Iraq, for people who have fled ISIS but who haven’t left the country.
The family has been quartered there for almost two years.
The camp holds some four thousand Internally Displaced People (I.D.P.s),
as they’re officially known. Legally, they aren’t refugees—they remain in their
home country—but they are often worse off than refugees, who can hope for aid
from the countries that take them in, or from the international community.
I.D.P.s remain at the mercy of governments at war, receiving limited aid and
enduring all the inherent dangers of war zones.
“Access
to safety without delay is the major problem faced by I.D.P.s in Iraq, due to
constantly shifting warfronts and the need for security screening to prevent
infiltration by ISIS,” Bruno Geddo, the
representative in Iraq of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told me. “A
related problem is restrictions to freedom of movement and family separation on
security grounds.” I.D.P.s are frequently limited in where they are allowed to
go; sometimes, they aren’t even allowed to leave the camps. The displaced often
become the forgotten people.
Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-pigeon-boy-and-other-forgotten-fugitives-from-isis
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