Sansani: ABP News report unearths details of Indians abducted in Iraq
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News Today At Nine: 39 Indians missing in Iraq
The ISIS crisis hit home and rocked the parliament today with the opposition cornering the government over the fate of 39 missing Indians. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has said that...
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News Today At Nine: 39 Indians missing in Iraq - Video
Before Mar Elia opened its doors to the refugees, it was run by two priests and a handful of volunteers. Now the number camping in the churchyard is 704 and there are 25 volunteers. Street smells permeate: washing, cooking, cigarette smoke. During the first week, the only thing I could hear was crying, Father Douglas Bazi, the parish priest, says. They were destroyed. The feeling of sadness is absolute. Everyone has lost a home, lost stability.
I visit a family in tent number 86. Nissan Potrus is a thickset man in his late 40s with a warm manner. He introduces me to Bernadette, his wife of 28 years, who is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the tent, washing clothes in a blue plastic bowl. The washing machine, he says. A pharmacist with Caritas, the Catholic aid and development agency, Potrus had a very good life in Qaraqosh. Bathrooms, showers, washing machine, TV, he says. I feel very sad, very angry. It is very difficult to be here.
Father Douglas Bazi, the parish priest whose church, Mar Elia, in Erbil, has more than 700 refugees in its grounds PHOTO: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
Christians mostly ethnic Assyrians had lived in Qaraqosh almost as long as Christianity itself. Potrus had no reason to expect radical militants would turn on the city. But then Isils mortar shells began to fall. He grabbed some money and ran out of his house with his wife, six children and grandchildren. He saw shrapnel sticking out of the body of a dead woman. Close by were the bodies of her two children. It is very difficult to see these things, he says. He left his car behind an Opel, German, very expensive because I wanted to get out quickly. The roads were blocked with people frantic to escape.
Mar Elia Catholic church is one of six churches in Erbil doubling as a shelter for some 3,000 families PHOTO: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
They walked for nearly five miles and then hitched a ride in the back of an oil truck. He only had enough money for three nights in a hotel in Erbil, where they washed the oil out of their clothes and slept safe. Then he came to Mar Elia on the recommendation of a Christian in the city. Two of his daughters were studying at Mosul university. They are now cleaners in Erbil. What does he do during the day? I help my wife clean the tent and think about home.
Ranine, Potruss 30-year-old daughter, crawls into the tent with a bag of clothes: a new delivery of international aid that still carries an Iraqi Airways tag. There is excitement because the family desperately need clothes. This is all I have, Potrus says, pointing to his check shirt and trousers. Ranine is dressed in what appear to be childrens pyjamas.
The bag contains one sock; a pack of ties; a low-cut black cocktail dress; a baggy pair of old tracksuit bottoms with a broken elasticated waist. The family is silent. I will use them to wash the floor, Bernadette says.
Nissan Potrus, who fled Qaraqosh with his wife, Bernadette, and their six children
PHOTO: Anastasia Taylor-Lind
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Exclusive: Inside the refugee camps of northern Iraq
Haider Elias boarded a plane to the United States from Iraq five years ago, leaving a life of war, ethnic violence and, as a Yazidi, religious persecution.
The Yazidis, ethnic Kurds, are an ancient religious minority whose faith, neither Christian nor Muslim, has roots in Zoroastrianism. Because he had worked as a translator for U.S. special operations forces during the war in Iraq, Elias was able to immigrate to the U.S. He now lives in southwest Houston, in close proximity to about 20 other Yazidi families.
His life here has given him ample opportunity. The 32-year-old father of three works as a translator, but has also earned a medical assistant's degree and even dreams of medical school.
But everything changed in August, when terrorist fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria swept through the Yazidis' ancestral homeland in northwestern Iraq, murdering some and driving thousands of others from their villages. Elias started receiving panicked calls from relatives and friends. They were fleeing toward Mount Sinjar, hoping to hide and find safety. His younger brother, Falah, was one person he managed to speak to. Elias could hear him hurrying and out of breath as sounds of screaming and gunfire trickled through the phone.
"Call my dad, please, and then call me back," Falah told him, before they hung up.
Minutes later, he received another call. ISIS fighters had just shot Falah in the head. He was dead.
"It was the saddest news I have ever received," said Elias, who returned Monday from Iraq, where the Yazidi community remains in crisis, with as many as 10,000 stranded in the Sinjar Mountains and thousands more in refugee camps.
"It was very frustrating and very sad," said Elias, a tall, slightly balding man with piercing eyes and a quiet voice.
He'd visited the camps, met with Iraqi officials and seen displaced friends and family living in unfinished buildings or in makeshift tents. He distributed blankets and infant formula, along with some socks and space heaters.
"It was very cold, and it was very hard for those families to live under that climate," he said. "Many were using gas-powered heaters to heat their tents, which has led to many of the homes catching fire."
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Ethnic Kurds in US traumatized by crisis in Iraq
OBAMA sending up to 300 soldiers to IRAQ as advisers BREAKING NEWS
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