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Iraq

Caught Between Army And Islamists, Fleeing Syrian Kurds Flood Into Iraqi Kurdistan

Though Kurdish Syrians have largely avoided any involvement in the country's civil war, they are now caught in the middle and fleeing in droves. A visit to the refugee camp in Iraq.

Syrian children fetch water at Kawergost Refugee Camp, some 50 km north of Erbil, capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
Syrian children fetch water at Kawergost Refugee Camp, some 50 km north of Erbil, capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region.
Guillaume Perrier

ERBIL — A pickup truck pierces through the dust cloud and stops at the camp’s entrance. It’s followed by a line of other vehicles arriving from Syria. It is clumsily packed with a family of eight, some blankets, pieces of furniture and an air-conditioning unit. Dozens of troops of the Peshmerga, the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government’s army, are trying to contain the new arrivals.

At the edge of huge oil fields, “at least 15,000 people have already arrived in two days” in the Kawergosk camp, located between Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan’s capital, and Mosul, according to town Mayor Djamal Martik.

“We have to stop this influx and send them to other camps,” the overwhelmed mayor insists.

As far as the eyes can see, thousands of tents — provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees — and as many families are roasting under the blazing sun. Many still remain without a shelter. “We’ve been waiting for three days,” says Jiwan, a Kurd from Qamishli, as he sits with his wife and young daughter in the two square meters of shade that their luggage provides them. All around, vehicles are transporting people and supplies. From the back of one truck, soldiers toss watermelons to a group of children.

Since Aug. 17 when Kurdish Iraqi authorities opened the border, more than 40,000 Kurdish refugees have crossed over from Syria, the Regional Government’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Falah Mustafa Bakir explains. In total, more than an estimated 200,000 people have arrived in the Kurdish region, according to official figures.

“The numbers were lower than in neighboring countries, so it didn’t draw that much attention,” Bakir says. “Now the problem has gone far beyond our capacities.” Iraqi Kurdistan regional President Masoud Barzani, who visited the Kawergosk camp on Aug. 20, has appealed to the international community for help.

Caught in a vise

“The worst off are those still over there,” a young refugee says, standing on top of a van. For the past week, those who have escaped Syria’s Kurdish region by the thousands relate the despair of the whole region. Until now, it had largely been spared the worst effects of the war.

The Rojava — the name of the Kurdish Syrians’ region — is increasingly isolated. “The border with Turkey is closed off to us, even though we live 500 meters away,” says Mustafa, an old man who arrived from Qamishli. Even though they avoided involvement with the Syrian regime or with the rebel brigades, Kurdish Syrians are now caught in a vise.

“Our village has been bombed by the regime,” says Fatma, who with her friend Djamila are from Rmeila, northern Syria’s oil production center. A larger number claim to have fled more frequent attacks on Kurds by the radical Islamist groups, the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

For more than a month, violent clashes between these jihadist groups and Kurdish fighters of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) — which is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the Marxist movement founded by Abdullah Öcalan — have been shaking the whole region. In Kobani, Afrin, Ra's al-"Ayn or in Tal Abyad, the Kurds claim to have repelled their attackers and killed hundreds of men during these clashes.

“These armed forces are terrifying civilians, which explains this exodus,” says Ibrahim Bro, secretary of the small Kurdish Syrian party Yekiti. “But tensions between Kurdish parties are also a cause of this situation. There’s fierce competition between Masoud Barzani and Abdullah Öcalan’s supporters. They’re both trying to impose their own model upon the Kurdish Syrians. And the PKK, just like the Ba'ath party, wants to impose a single-party system.”

This is also the opinion of Abdel Hakim Bashar, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Syria, affiliated with Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani. He thinks “the civilians are also fleeing the PYD’s policies.”

The party, the most popular and the most organized among the nebula of Kurdish Syrian movements, “insists on controlling the humanitarian aid and refuses to work with anyone,” Bashar says. The attempts to unify the views of Syria’s Kurdish National Council — which counts more than 20 movements — and of the PKK branch have been unsuccessful.

“The Kurdish house has to be put back in order,” Bashar says.

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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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