Pakistani Filmmaker Captures the Lives of Iraqi Refugee Children

Award-winning journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is touring the United States with her latest film, “The Lost Generation,” a documentary on Iraq’s refugee children produced for Great Britain’s prestigious TV station Channel 4. So far, Obaid-Chinoy has been unable to find a U.S. station to televise the documentary. “A few of them have expressed reservations about showing this,” she says.

Focusing on children who have taken refuge in Jordan and Syria, the film addresses their future prospects back home, a country that has undergone constant turmoil since 2003. In the past five years, more than four million people, 20 percent of the entire Iraqi population, have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed. Two million have become exiles, living lives across the border in Syria and Jordan.

The first non-American journalist to win a Livingston Award, the Pakistani filmmaker has a relentless eye for reality—perhaps too relentless for a media looking for stories molded to a commercial frame. She traveled throughout Jordan and Syria to find the war’s youngest victims. Her subjects, often mutilated in body and soul, exhibit a calm lethargy one usually sees in those well advanced in years.

There are young Iraqi women with business degrees working in the brothels of Damascus. They and others have studied for careers they may never have a chance of attaining. For those whose families have been killed in Iraq, future prospects are dim.

There is Hanan, 12, living in Amman. She lost her six siblings and parents in a suicide-bomb attack outside her mosque. The blast left her with severe burns, from head to toe. Obaid-Chinoy asks her what she would wish for most in the world. “Better surgery,” she answers, because Hanan has to cover her head and her crippled feet can’t fit in proper shoes. She goes to a Jordanian hospital for an operation. “Today they are making me more beautiful,” she says, full of joy. But the camera soon catches her tears, when the surgeon explains that she has to wait another year. The waiting list is endless, and new names are added every day.

Obaid-Chinoy meets former translators who worked for British and American troops and have had to flee for their lives. In Syria, their army recommendations have now become worthless, and the countries they risked their lives to support have meanwhile turned their backs on them. Great Britain, for example, accepted only four Iraqi Asylum seekers from Syria in 2007, according to a United Nations Development Program official who spoke with Obaid-Chinoy.

In 2007, when the filmmaker began to study the Iraq war, she decided that meeting refugees outside their country would help her understand the situation in Iraq. In April of that year, the United Nations Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR) called a conference in Geneva, declaring that Iraq’s humanitarian crisis could no longer be ignored.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres asked for a “sustained, comprehensive and coordinated international response to ease the plight of millions of people uprooted by the conflict.”

A study by the U.S. based  Refugees International (RI) on the current situation for Iraqi refugees paints a sad picture. Two of the group’s advocates, Kristèle Younès and Jake Kurtzer, who returned from Iraq last November said: “The situation for Iraqi refugees in the Middle East continues to deteriorate, while the scale of the crisis continues to dwarf the international response.” According to their study, the number of displaced Iraqis has reached an unprecedented level.