Refugee Crisis

Apr 11

“There is no security in Baghdad. We lived in constant fear. We started receiving text messages one day. They said: ‘Give us money, or we will burn down your house. If you tell the police, we will kill you.’ We had nobody to turn to. We are poor people. We have no powerful friends. We don’t know anyone in the government. The text messages continued every day. We were so afraid that we could not sleep. We had no money to give them. We could barely afford to feed ourselves. So we said to ourselves: ‘Maybe they are lying. Maybe they will do nothing.’ Then one night we woke up and our house was on fire. We barely escaped with the children. The next day we received a text message. It said: ‘Give us money, or this time you will die.’ I replied that we’d pay them soon. We sold everything we owned, and we left. We thought we’d rather die in a plastic boat than die there.”

More from this series

Series Storage

“My father loved children. But I was his favorite because I was the small one.”

“The army searched our house six times. The first two times they knocked on the door.”

“I’m sixty-two years old. I was a government clerk in Baghdad.”

“I lived in Mosul for five months under ISIS. I tried to avoid trouble but one of my neighbors reported me for shaving my beard”

“I studied to be a teacher, but I’m young, so I knew I’d be forced to fight.”

“I wish I could have done more for her. Her life has been nothing but struggle.”

“My husband and I sold everything we had to afford the journey.”

“There is no security in Baghdad. We lived in constant fear.”

“ISIS looks for any reason to punish you.”

“The extent to which refugee children have been conditioned by their environment is heartbreaking.”

“A friend called me at work and told me that a sniper had shot my youngest brother.”

“I’m working as an interpreter. I know what these people are going through. “

“I worked as a waiter in Saudi Arabia for seven years to save money so that I could build a house in Syria.”

“I saw the army burn my neighbor’s house. They set it on fire and took photographs while it burned.”

“Every month we had to go to Baghdad to get my son’s eyes treated.”

“Before leaving for Europe, I went back to Syria to see my family once more.”

Adam Parks https://apollocreativeco.com