Palestinian refugees in Iraq on the move again
Following attacks by Islamic State, dozens of individuals continue their search for a new, safe place to call home
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The advances of the Islamic State group in Iraq has forced dozens of Palestinian refugees to once again leave their temporary places of residence in search of a safer area to call home, at least for a while.
The Baharka refugee camp, located in Iraqi Kurdistan, currently houses 1,120 displaced families, among 85 Palestinian individuals from 18 different families, Al-Jazeera reported Thursday. The Palestinian refugees in the camp have been displaced several times in the past, some of them twice within the past year, due to the raging battles between coalition forces and the Islamic State.
“Most of my life I’ve lived in the camps, from when I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp up to now — all of my children were born in the camps,” Hudda Awad, 49, who was born in the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank, told Al-Jazeera.
The Al-Jazeera report didn’t say under what circumstances Awad left Tulkarem and how she ended up in Iraq.
“We [the Palestinians] here are professional refugees,” she continued.
“We are teaching [the Iraqis] here how to make their rooms, how to make a kitchen area in the tents, even a living room, we teach them how to make their tents weatherproof, how to secure against the rain. I’m a professional, I’ve lived my whole life as a professional refugee.”
Nazmi Hazouri, the consul-general for Palestine in Iraqi Kurdistan, asserted that the shifting of Palestinian refugees from place to place inside Iraq has ceased to be a rare occurrence.
“They always have to move according to their situation, and now [because of the Islamic State] we have a completely new situation for them,” Hazouri said.
Ahmad Mohammed Adiyab, a fellow refugee whose family had relocated through Lebanon and Kuwait before reaching Iraq, said that the Palestinians in the region must learn to bond together in order to ease their state of constant upheaval.
“The feeling of all the Palestinian people here is that we are one family, we look after each other, and we look out for each other,” he told Al-Jazeera. “We are outside of our country. We need each other.”
The Times of Israel Community.