Refugees face desperate winter

Tented Iraqi refugee camps have been damaged by torrential wind and rain. Many of the 10,000 Christian families who fled Mosul and the Nineveh Plain before the barbaric offensive of jihadist militants, and found refuge in Kurdistan, face a freezing winter in tents.

Over just one night of heavy rain three weeks ago at Ankawa, in a Christian enclave in the Kurdistan regional government’s capital of Erbil, which houses 7,850 families, “tents quickly filled with water, collapsed and were engulfed in mud”, reported a Dominican Sister of St Catherine of Siena who is helping to provide the displaced with shelter, food, hygiene and water. 

Now, thousands are sheltering in a sports centre and mall, sleeping on concrete floors. “Children cannot attend school as many facilities are housing the displaced,” said the sister, “and no one knows what the future holds.”

The displaced were visited on 5 November by the Patriarch of Babylon of the Chaldeans, Louis Raphael I and Archbishop Giorgio Lingua, apostolic nuncio to Iraq and Jordan. They promised efforts to find jobs for the unemployed and provide schools. Kurdistan in winter regularly sees more than three feet of snow.