Iraqi refugees need psychological first aid

Fourteen-year-old Yusra wipes away a tear before laying her head on the shoulder of aid worker Parzhin, after facing up to her fears and telling her story.

Yusra and her Yazidi family were forced to seek refuge in Zakho, a town in northern Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region, after fleeing a sweeping jihadist onslaught.

One of the 1.8 million people the United Nations estimates have fled the conflict this year, Yusra is struggling not just with the physical hardships of being forced from her home but also with the trauma of running in fear.

For Yusra and those like her, the aid group Action Against Hunger has set up a mental health program to help deal with their anguish. The group also supplies food and water to the struggling refugees.

"Our aim is to ensure that they know there are people here for them," Parzhin said, describing her work with the Yazidi refugees as "psychological first aid".

"Their psychology has been damaged ... (by) the images they have seen; people have been killed in front of them."

Yusra and Parzhin sit cross-legged on the fourth floor of a building still under construction, talking discreetly.

In early August, Yusra and her family left their village in the Sinjar Mountain range when they heard that Islamic State militants were coming.

The jihadists had launched a lightning offensive across northern Iraq two months earlier, and fear was a primary weapon in their arsenal.

The minority Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking and non-Muslim, following a faith born in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago.

It is rooted in Zoroastrianism, which is anathema to extremist Muslims who brand them devil-worshippers.

"When we heard the IS was coming, we were afraid people would have their throats cut and women would be abducted, so we fled into the mountains," Yusra said, touching the white scarf around her neck.

For nine days they holed up in the barren hills, without food or water under a searing summer sun, watching children suffer from hunger and thirst.

"Then the PKK came," she said, referring to friendly Kurdistan Workers' Party militants, "and we walked all the way to here."

Now she and 7,000 others are trying to survive in a complex of six multistory buildings that are under construction.

Work at one building on the site has resumed, and workers mingle with the refugees, some of whom live on floors with no walls or windows, open to the elements.

"Nobody can live here. Winter is coming, and there's no one to help us move into camps," Yusra said.

Every day, employees of the aid group, like Parzhin, spend time with the refugees. She said the important thing in working with people like Yusra is to let them express themselves.

"I'm here to listen," she said, "to help people adapt to a bad situation."

Counseling can help teach the refugees how to adapt. Many were middle class before their lives changed forever, and they need to be taught to use the emergency resources available to them because they are not accustomed to living in poverty.

The Kurdish authorities have installed water cisterns on the building site, but the sanitary arrangements remain rudimentary at best.

(China Daily 09/15/2014 page12)