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The COVID-19 pandemic is having a profound impact on the Yazidi community in the Sinjar district of northwest Iraq. Although there are not many cases recorded in the area, the restrictive measures adopted in Iraq (as in many other countries worldwide) to curb the spread of the virus are burdening the daily lives and wellbeing of an already vulnerable community.

In 2014, the Islamic State (IS) group swept through the Sinjar region mounting what Yazidis, a religious minority mainly living in north-west Iraq, refer to as a genocidal campaign against them.

The IS militants slaughtered thousands of men and abducted an estimated six thousand women and children, either selling them into servitude or forcing them into sexual slavery. More than six years on, and after the city was taken back from IS in 2015, many families have been left with mental and physical scars. Some people are still looking for loved ones who went missing or mourning those who died, and many are fighting to rebuild their livelihoods.

The spread of COVID-19 has brought strict movement restrictions between the cities across Iraq. In Sinjar, these restrictions have immensely affected the economic situation and daily lives of local people, and in turn, their mental wellbeing. Most people in Sinjar were already living well below the poverty line, with widespread unemployment. Following the arrival of COVID-19, those who once had jobs are forced to stay at home, unable to work and provide for their families.

Aeed Nasir has been working with MSF in the Sinuni General Hospital as a nurse supervisor since 2018. Aeed is married with four children and lives in Chamshko camp for internally displaced people in Dohuk governorate. Aeed hasnt seen his family in five months as he is unable to go back to Dohuk under the current movement restrictions.

The majority of people in Sinjar are either farmers or do temporary labourer jobs outside the city lasting for one or two days at a time, said Aeed.

The coronavirus has stopped all the businesses, and people cant travel outside the town for work. The farmers harvest is not even close to yielding the efforts and money spent on it by the farmer, and merchants from other governorates cant come to buy the products and take them to the other governorates. Hence the crops and vegetables end up rotten. Before the coronavirus, people had very little income. Now theres none.

For many people, losing the ability to provide enough for their families, alongside having too much free time, living with uncertainty about what the future might bring, and not being able to visit family members, have caused feelings of frustration and stress. This has particularly adverse consequences for people who are already trying to overcome traumatic experiences from their past.

We have seen an increase in domestic violence; men are sitting at home without work and they are forced to spend a lot more time with the family than they are used to, said Phoebe Yonkeu, MSFs mental health activity manager in Sinuni.

After the easing of curfews, we received many women who said their spouses had become aggressive towards them and their children. Aggressive behaviour and anger towards family members is a way to channel/vent their frustrations and anxieties. We have also observed a surge of people suffering from depression in Sinjar, and we believe the lockdown has played a big role in that. Over the last few months, we have received many patients with suicidal thoughts and attempts, which are severe symptoms of depression.

With the imposed movement restrictions, access to healthcare is another big challenge the people in Sinjar struggle with.

Before the curfews were imposed, people who needed specialised medical services used to be referred to the hospitals in Duhok governorate in Iraqi Kurdistan, said Shanna Morris, a doctor with MSF in Sinuni.

Now, people cant travel to Dohuk and the only destination available for them is Mosul. To access Mosul for medical needs, they must travel by ambulance so theyre allowed to cross checkpoints. On average, it takes four hours before a patient reaches the hospitals in Mosul. Many Yazidi people also have reservations about going to Mosul either due to the events of 2014, or because many of them dont speak Arabic and its hard for them to communicate.

For many people living in the villages in Sinjar, Sinuni General Hospital where MSF provides emergency and maternity services is the only option for healthcare services. But fewer women are coming because they are not allowed through the checkpoints to get to the hospital.

Our outpatient department numbers have greatly decreased, said Adelaide Debrah , a midwife working for MSF in Sinuni.

Women are not coming for antenatal or postnatal care and family planning because they cannot cross the checkpoints; they are not considered an emergency. After some recent easing of movement restrictions, we received more women with unwanted pregnancies who told us that they ran out of family planning items and medication.

Fear of instability

On top of COVID-19, recent airstrikes in the region and ongoing military campaigns against groups affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are causing further mental stress and people fear the area will become a warzone again.

The day the fighter jets bombed the Sinjar mountain, I was in Sinuni. The first rocket terrified me; I didnt know what was going on. The first thing that came to my mind was that IS was back in Sinjar. said Aeed.

After some phone calls, I learnt that it was Turkish bombings of PKK-affiliated groups. The house I stay in is very close to one of their bases and out of fear of the base being bombed, I left the house. I wandered around Sinuni and heard women and children screaming. People were carrying their children and trying to move far away from the bases. Now, people have stopped visiting the mountainous areas completely, out of fear of being targeted by warplanes.

As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc, many people have lost what little hope they had left.

The Yazidi people still havent forgotten what happened to them in 2014, said Aeed. The consequences of the carnage still dominate the area, with mass graves still being found. I see hopelessness in peoples faces. Some dont even have enough money to buy food. It happens many times that we the hospital staff collect donations ourselves for some patients. There is nothing in Sinjar, even the water is not suitable for drinking sometimes. How do you think people feel when they have nothing?

MSF in Sinuni

MSF began supporting Sinuni General Hospital with emergency and maternity healthcare in August 2018, and quickly realised that mental health was a huge unmet need in the area. Since then, the team has increased mental health activities to cover psychiatric and psychological services in Sinuni General Hospital, as well as group sessions and mental health activities for displaced people in the Sinjar mountain.

Serving more than 90,000 people, the MSF project in Sinuni provides health services for all communities in the area. In 2019, MSF treated 14,581 patients in its emergency room in the Sinuni General hospital. The team also assisted 755 births, provided 8,702 sexual and reproductive healthcare consultations and 1,434 mental health consultations.

Original post:
Yazidi community suffers one crisis after another - Iraq - ReliefWeb

Eid-ul-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, is traditionally a time of giving, compassion and celebration with family and friends. We mark it this year amid COVID-19, which has overwhelmed us all and compounded Iraqs economic, social and political challenges.

But we must not surrender. We all must push on. We must remain hopeful that brighter days lie ahead.

We can all do our part by remaining disciplined, responsible and optimistic while following the instructions of the health authorities.

Eid-ul-Adha is an opportunity for us to reflect on the many sacrifices we have all made in fighting this disease, especially the brave healthcare workers.

In the spirit of compassion and giving, let us remember the less fortunate, those who remain displaced or have lost loved ones.

Let us wish each other peace, good health and hope for a better future.

Adha Mubarak to all

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Message from UN Iraq Special Representative Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert to the Iraqi people on Eid-ul-Adha [EN/AR/KU] - Iraq - ReliefWeb

Some of Drapers most revealing passages focus on the intense pressure that Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, as well as the Defense Department official Douglas J. Feith, exerted on the intelligence agencies to buttress and even concoct the case that Saddam had intimate ties with Al Qaeda and that he possessed weapons of mass destruction. Draper presents the former C.I.A. director George Tenet in a particularly unflattering light. After being shunted aside during the Clinton presidency, Tenet was desperate to show Bush that he was an important and loyal soldier in the new war against terrorism. Here we had this precious access, one senior analyst told Draper, and he didnt want to blow it. Tenet and his aides, Draper writes, feared the prospect of President Bush being spoon-fed a bouillabaisse of truths, unverified stories presented as truths and likely falsehoods. On the other hand, the agency stood to lose its role in helping separate fact from fiction if it appeared to be close-minded.

But Tenet ended up displaying canine fealty to Bush. In October 2002, when asked by the Senate intelligence chairman Bob Graham about whether any links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden really existed, Draper writes, Tenet issued a reply that Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz and Feith could only have dreamed of. He declared, among other things, that there was solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda going back a decade.

For all the effort that Cheney and others expended in trying to depict Iraq as a dire menace, how much did the evidence and details actually matter? The cold, hard truth is that they didnt. They were political Play-Doh, to be massaged and molded as Bushs camarilla saw fit. Draper highlights the famous slam dunk meeting in the Oval Office in December 2002, when Tenet assured Bush that the evidence for Colin Powells upcoming speech at the United Nations Security Council in support of an invasion was solid.

In Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward described Bush as being beset by doubt about the case for war, and suggested that Tenets affirmation had been very important. Draper disagrees. The issue wasnt the evidence. It was the spin: Tenets words were important only because they helped remove any doubt as to whether the C.I.A. could mount a solid case. Bushs thinking was as clear as it was simplistic. Saddam was a monster. It would be a bad idea to leave him in power. According to Draper, Bushs increasingly bellicose rhetoric reflected a wartime president who was no longer tethered to anything other than his own convictions.

In his 2005 Inaugural Address, Bush tried to turn neoconservative ideology into official doctrine: It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world. It wasnt until the shellacking that the Republicans endured in the 2006 midterm elections that Bush began to abandon his fantasies about spreading peace, love and understanding across the Middle East. He fired Rumsfeld and shunted Cheney to the side.

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Why the United States Invaded Iraq - The New York Times

Baghdad (AFP) - Thirty years have passed since Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein invaded neighbouring Kuwait, but despite hints of a diplomatic rapprochement, people in both countries say the wounds have yet to heal.

On August 2, 1990, Saddam sent his military, already exhausted by an eight-year conflict with Iran, into Kuwait to seize what he dubbed "Iraq's 19th province."

The two-day operation turned into a seven-month occupation and, for many Iraqis, opened the door to 30 years of devastation that has yet to end.

From Baghdad to Basra, Kirkuk to Babylon, Iraqis agree that the incursion "marked the beginning of the end."

"Since the invasion of Kuwait, we haven't known peace or security," said Um Sarah, a retired teacher in Baghdad.

"It's only gone from bad to worse, like we were cursed."

Iraq's occupation of its much smaller neighbour ended swiftly with US-led Operation Desert Storm.

But it was followed by a decade of crippling sanctions, another US invasion in 2003, civil war, sectarian violence and the jihadist proto-state of the Islamic State group, only defeated in late 2017.

The most painful of these, for many Iraqis, was the embargo imposed by the United Nations just four days after Saddam's invasion.

The Iraqi dinar, until then worth $3, began a jaw-dropping devaluation, settling at 3,000 dinars to the dollar.

The wages from a month of working odd jobs were barely enough to buy a chicken to feed the family, recalled Jassem Mohammed, who lived through the embargo in the city of Kut, around 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of the capital.

To survive, Iraqis had to get crafty: reusing every bit of plastic or metal, rewearing old clothes and bartering instead of buying.

Iraqi troops returning from Kuwait saw their savings vanish.

"For the first time, I saw a senior officer with the rank of colonel using public transportation to get around," said ex-soldier Sarmad al-Bayati.

"The army lost its prestige."

- 'They hung her' -

A few cunning businessmen linked to Saddam ran sanctions-busting and smuggling operations, prototypes of the mass graft still plaguing the Iraqi state today.

Story continues

"The embargo changed people's ethics and opened the way for corruption," said Mohammed.

It also destroyed Iraq's middle class: with goods barred from entering, Hisham Mohammed saw his father's business of importing construction materials collapse.

"With the embargo, products weren't entering anymore and all of my father's capital -- 100,000 dinars -- was worth nothing," said the 50-year-old Baghdad resident.

Iraq's currency and its homegrown industries have yet to recover, even three decades on.

While Iraq languished, Kuwait prospered: its currency is one of the most valuable in the world and its people are some of the wealthiest.

But they are still haunted by Saddam's invasion.

Entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, hundreds of Kuwaitis were tortured or executed, and thousands more were taken as prisoners of war.

Only 17 at the time, Ghida al-Amer is still horrified by the fate of her older sister, a chemist who helped the Kuwaiti "resistance" lay explosives for incoming Iraqi troops.

"They hung her with electrical wires," she recalled.

"The wound is still there."

- Forgive, but never forget -

Even politically, the war's bitter legacy is taking years to undo.

The UN only lifted the last of its sanctions on Iraq in 2010, and Baghdad has paid around $50 billion in the last three decades in reparations.

Today facing its worst fiscal crisis in years amid the coronavirus pandemic and plummeting oil prices, Iraq has asked for an extension for the final $3.8 billion.

Kuwait has demonstrated some goodwill: in 2018, it hosted a global summit to gather funds to rebuild Iraq, ravaged by the three-year fight against IS.

But it remains bitter over two issues: borders and bodies.

Kuwait's maritime patrols regularly detain Iraqi fishermen who stray too far into neighbouring waters. Iraq says the UN-drawn maritime borders are unfair.

Kuwait is also lambasting Iraq for delays in identifying the remains of Kuwaiti victims buried in Iraq.

The fate of around 1,000 citizens from each country remains unknown, after years of war and chaos.

A programme by the International Committee of the Red Cross to repatriate remains has only brought home the bodies of 215 Kuwaitis and 85 Iraqis.

Shuruq Qabazard, who was a young girl during the invasion, said the last 30 years have helped her empathise with Iraqis.

Her father Ahmad, a leading figure of Kuwait's resistance, was tortured and ultimately killed by Iraqi forces.

"With time, we discovered that Iraqis, like us, suffered the tyranny of Saddam Hussein," she said.

But erasing the scars of the invasion is "impossible", she said.

"It was the most important event for my entire generation," she told AFP.

"We may be able to forgive and reconciliate, but we will never be able to forget."

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Three decades on, Iraq and Kuwait haunted by Saddam's invasion - Yahoo News

TEHRAN President Hassan Rouhani has highlighted the necessity to expand relations between Iran and Iraq and also speed up implementation of agreements.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is determined to develop comprehensive relations with Iraq and is ready to cooperate and transfer its experiences to the country in fighting coronavirus, Rouhani told Iraqi President Barham Salih in a phone call on Friday.

Rouhani also described a visit by Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi to Iran as positive.

Salih also called Kadhimis visit positive and called for increasing cooperation.

He noted that developing relations with Iran is a principle in Iraqs foreign policy.

Kadhimi visited Tehran on July 21-22 to discuss ties between Iran and Iraq. The Iraqi prime minister met with a number of high-ranking Iranian officials including Rouhani, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

During a joint press conference with Rouhani on July 21, Kadhimi said that his visit to Iran was aimed at boosting ties.

Former Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi has said that Kadhimis visit to Iran was in line with expanding foreign ties.

In an interview with Iraqi News Agency, Abadi said that the objective behind the visit was benefiting Iraq and using depth of its history and civilization to boost its foreign relations, ISNA reported on Monday.

He also said that Iraq is very important for Iran in countering the sanctions.

The former prime minister said Iraq is like air way for Iran.

NA/PA

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Rouhani highlights need to expand relations with Iraq - Tehran Times