Continually displaced, Palestinian refugees suffer in Iraq

Khadra Ibrahim, shakes her head at the mention of her current home – a cramped, but well-kept, refugee tent in Baharka Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp, near Erbil in the north of Iraq. Ibrahim is the matriarch of one of the eighteen families of refugees at the IDP camp. Unlike the displaced Iraqi families at Baharka, this life isn’t temporary for the Palestinians, she says – this is just how life is for a Palestinian refugee.

Ibrahim, was born in Khan al-Sheikh Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. Over sixty years later, she sits with Middle East Monitor in the fourth tent she has had to take refuge in – and the second within the past year.

“All the Palestinians are tired and persecuted,” Ibrahim tells MEMO in the small confines of the tent she shares with several family members. “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria happened and we had to flee again and come to Khazir IDP camp and from there we fled to Kalak. We slept there eight days on the ground, we had no blankets or anything, after eight days we were brought to this camp where we are staying now.”

Baharka IDP camp hosts over one thousand Iraqi families, displaced when the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), advanced on Mosul and surrounding Nineveh Plains, taking over swathes of land in the war-torn country. For the eighteen Palestinian families living under refugee status – this camp has become just the latest in a string of temporary homes for these Palestinian families, stretching back to their initial displacement in 1948 when fleeing Jewish paramilitary organisations during the Nakba, or “catastrophe”.

Crossing a large muddied track in the centre of the camp, over stagnant wastewater accumulated from the rows of tents that line Baharka, Ibrahim and her husband, Ibrahim Al-Fahmawry, can be found, keeping watch for her lively grandchildren that use the camps erratic muddy pathways as playgrounds.

Al-Fahmawry was just seven years old when his family fled from their home in Haifa in 1948. Al-Fahmawry never believed that the day he fled, would be the last time he would set foot on Palestinian soil – and that his life as a Palestinian refugee would continue indefinitely.

“Come and see, the Iraqi people are tired,” Al-Fahmawry says. “I pray to God to help them, but what about us? We’ve been refugees since 1948. This is not a life. I would love to touch the Palestinian soil and kiss it.”

Life is hard for the two of us, Ibrahim confesses sitting beside her husband. Palestinian refugees have nothing, she says, life is just one of moving from place to place, where there exists no hope to return to Palestine.

“We will live and die in a camp,” Ibrahim continues. “I swear to God, we spend all our life in the camps. Our feeling is one of injustice, our life is not comfortable – not for us and not for our children.”

A few meters from Ibrahim’s tent, after navigating under washing lines that string between walkways, 21-year-old Mohammed Hadidi can be found wandering the Palestinian sector of Baharka. Hadidi, has a cheery demeanour, happy to point out each tent and recount the residents back story. The family beside him are from Tulkarm he says, they fled to Syria, later Kuwait, then Iraq. On the other side are a family who fled to Lebanon initially, this is their fourth refugee camp he says hesitantly, reciting in his mind the family’s history – or it could be their fifth camp, he says correcting himself.

While most of the families are not related to each other Hadidi tells MEMO, the Palestinian refugees here have come to see each other as one extended family.

“Most of us are not related,” Hadidi continues. “But these people are still my family because they are Palestinian. I come to the old people and I call them my grandparents because they are old Palestinian people, they are not even my family but I call them this, and all of us feel that we are family – we are all Palestinian.”

This is only the second camp, Hadidi, has lived in, having fled Mosul as ISIS advanced on the Iraqi city. Initially seeking refuge in Khazir IDP camp last summer, Hadidi, fled again when the Sunni extremists made a move towards Khazir, turning the camp into a battlefield.

He counts himself lucky, he says, compared to his fellow Palestinian refugees, who have been passed from country to country, and camp to camp throughout their lifetime. Hadidi has no illusions about what his future may hold however. He imagines this won’t be the last camp he will have to take shelter in, and that seeing his native Palestine with his own eyes will elude him his whole life.

“There is no hope in my mind, I can’t imagine to go back to our country.” Hadidi tells MEMO standing among the Palestinian tents at Baharka. “I have never seen it [Palestine], and my father has never seen it, but my grandfather fled from there. I saw Palestine on the TV, but I hope we will go back, but really there is no hope. I can imagine that I could go to any country in the world, apart from my own country Palestine.”

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.