Iraqi Refugee Stories

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You’ve likely heard about the 2 million Iraqi refugees living in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, the Gulf States, Iran, Turkey, and Yemen, but Iraqi Refugee Stories brings those statistics to life with videos of displaced people describing the circumstances that forced them out out of their homeland.

The site has a bunch of interesting information, includine an interactive map showing where the refugees live now.

Some of the most moving stories:

Marwa,
a young woman living in Damascus, plans to return to Iraq. In Syria,
she says, it’s hard to find money to rent an apartment and pay for
food. She says that if she is to die, at least she will be with family,
in her homeland.

16-year-old Sahar (not clear where she’s living) talks with chilling detachment about how her father was murdered on Christmas day.

Basem,
an engineer, was working for the US Coalition Forces and KBR in Iraq,
but after receiving death threats, he and his family fled to Syria in
2005. He doesn’t expect to return to his homeland any time soon.

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If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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