Children are being forced into work and early marriage in Iraq, as war continues to scar the country 20 years after the 2003 invasion.
Sarra Ghazi, Iraq country director for Save The Children, said that the country was still in “crisis” two decades after US-led coalition troops including the British Army invaded, with significant risks to children.
Around 10 per cent of Iraq’s population – an estimated 4.1 million people – are still in need of humanitarian assistance, with nearly a third living in poverty. More than a million Iraqis are still displaced within the country, unable to return to their homes due to dangers, instability or lack of infrastructure.
“Twenty years of insecurity and limited economic opportunities have taken a very heavy toll on families across the country. Many are having to resort to negative coping strategies such as child labour. Children aren’t being able to go to school, which just repeats the cycle,” she told i.
Ms Ghazi recently met Zainab, a 14-year-old girl whose family fled their home in Mosul during conflict and moved to Kirkuk. The family can only afford to send one of their five children to school, so Zainab and her siblings go out to work to pay for educational expenses like travel and equipment, selling items such as tissues on the street.
“You see this thirst and this hunger for learning, and they’ll do anything they can to be able to get to school,” Ms Ghazi said. “They know that street vending is very dangerous, but it’s all they can do.”
Ms Ghazi said that global economic pressures felt around the world after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine were compounding the existing crises within Iraq.
“Economically, globally, things are very difficult, prices have gone up. And Iraq is is no different to any other country. But what compounds the problem in Iraq is the displacement. People are struggling with where to live, how to live, how to make ends meet. It just compounds all the challenges,” she said.
But despite this, Ms Ghazi said that international funding for reconstruction programmes in Iraq was declining – and this was expected to get worse.
“Iraq is no longer classified as a humanitarian response country [by the UN]. It’s now shifting from a humanitarian-only response to a development focused. And with the emergence of crises in other countries in the region, international funding for the humanitarian assistance in Iraq has declined and it’s expected to fall very rapidly over the next couple of years,” she said.
“But the needs in the country are still huge. With families living under the poverty line, they again are forced to adopt these negative coping mechanisms leading to child protection risks, including child marriage and child labour. It is a very, very challenging situation, and [we] cannot let Iraq become a forgotten crisis.”
According to the UN’s International Organisation for Migration, Iraq “remains a country at very high risk of humanitarian crisis” and warned it was facing “three overlapping crises”: the devastating repercussions of years of conflict including displacement and poverty, political instability and the impact of Covid, as well as ongoing violence from armed groups. It is also facing growing water scarcity and droughts.