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| Children of the camp: About 600 children, age15 and below, live in the Al-Manathra refugee camp outside Najaf, Iraq. Sam Dagher |
Aid shrinks as Iraq's internal refugee tally grows
Some 280 NGOs are caring for Iraq's 2.3 million displaced by fighting. But the international support is drying up.
By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the November 30, 2007 edition
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Al-Manathra, Iraq - Abdul-Hassan Hussein has heard that security is improving in his Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya, recently a hotbed of Sunni extremists who were targeting Shiites like himself.
But Mr. Hussein is not rushing back just yet, as relatives there say it's too soon to know if the quiet will last.
While the return of some of the estimated 2.2 million refugees in Syria and neighboring countries is being heralded by Iraqi officials as a sign of progress in Baghdad, many of the Shiites in this refugee camp, who have come here because it's close to their holy city of Najaf, will stay until they are convinced the sectarian warfare in Baghdad has truly ended.
Mr. Hussein and his family – he is a father of eight who is also caring for the 10-member family of his brother, killed in Ghazaliya at the height of sectarian bloodshed last year – are among the 2.3 million Iraqis considered internally displaced as of the end of September. That number is 16 percent higher than August, according the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization (IRCO).
And as the number of the internally displaced is growing, aid workers say the conditions they are living in is growing worse. They say it is becoming especially tough for children 12 and under, who make up 65 percent of the total number of internally displaced Iraqis.
Aid agencies say the situation is getting harsher because of dwindling aid from international agencies and an overwhelmed central government in Baghdad. Hussein and his family have been living with 2,000 other people in the camp for more than a year now.
"Up to this point, the central government has done nothing for these people, only [nongovernmental organizations] help them sometimes, and all that has been spent on the camp is from our budget," says Ahmed Duaibel, spokesman for the Najaf government. "Our pleas to Baghdad have fallen on deaf ears."
And help from other quarters is also less forthcoming. As of last Friday, a United Nations fund for emergency relief for Iraqi children and refugees had only $33.8 million in it. The UN says it must have $98.9 million to meet the needs, including those of the internally displaced.
Kasra Mofarah, who heads the Jordan-based NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq (NCCI), an umbrella group of 280 nongovernmental
organizations working in Iraq, says he is now seeing donor fatigue after years of contributors sinking billions of dollars
into the country's reconstruction with little results. Plus, many fear lack of accountability, he says.
Most domestic refugees live their lives in limbo. They are often treated as second-class citizens in the provinces where they fled to. They are not allowed to reregister their domicile, which prevents them in most cases from receiving monthly food rations or enrolling their children in local schools.
