‘EXTREME WEATHER THREATENS DISPLACED IRAQI CHILDREN’

Mon 28 December 2020:

The Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights (IHCHR) said on Sunday that extreme weather is threatening the lives of displaced children in camps.

“The lives of thousands of displaced people, especially women and children, are under threat,” Fadel al-Gharrawi, a member of the IHCHR, said.

He added that most of the displaced Iraqis are living in camps with no access to heating, which is causing illnesses.

The Middle East country is experiencing below zero degree temapartures, mainly during the nights.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are unable to return to their homes, which were destroyed during the war against Daesh/ISIS that began in 2014.

The terror group captured large swathes of territories including Mosul, Salahuddin and Anbar provinces, and parts of Diyala and Kirkuk provinces. Government forces took back control of the areas in 2017.

Earlier this year in February, a UN report stated that 45,000 displaced children in Iraq lack personal identification documents and that many of them do not receive education two years after the defeat of Daesh.

The report issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) indicated that about 45,000 displaced children are living in the camps, who lack personal identification documents, reported the Anadolu Agency.

The report said that one of five families who live outside the camps had children with documentation problems (lack of identification documents).

The report added that most of the families that lived under Daesh control lacked at least one of their essential identification documents, i.e., either lost, confiscated, destroyed, or not issued in the first place.

The report pointed to two main factors that challenge children’s access to proper education, the first of which is “the lack of appropriate programs aimed at reintegrating the students, whose studies were interrupted for too long, into the government education system.”

The second factor is the difficulty in obtaining identification documents, which constitutes a major challenge for parents while trying to enroll their children in school.

The UN report called on the Iraqi government to minimize administrative and security challenges, accelerate children’s access to civil documents, and review the provisions on the forms of education available to them, which compensates for the loss of years of education due to the control of Daesh over the children’s hometowns.

FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:

TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent