Steven A. Cook
When we arrived at the gates of Iraq’s Bardarash refugee camp in December 2019, the emotional pain of the scene leveled me: Cold, wind-swept rain fell as a gaggle of small children, ankle-deep in mud, congregated around our delegation of Washington-based think tankers who had come to Iraq at the invitation of UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency. The camp, which had been decommissioned in 2017, had reopened in the fall after Syrian Kurds fled to Iraq seeking safety from Turkish airstrikes. Camp officials said Bardarash had “only” 10,000 inhabitants, but it was hard to make sense of that qualifier. Extending in every direction for what seemed like miles were rows of white tents emblazoned with the UNHCR logo in the familiar U.N. blue.
It was eight years after the U.S. withdrawal, and Iraq was deeply unstable. Mass protests raged in the streets against government dysfunction, a corrupt ruling class, and nonexistent social services. Provincial governments had few resources, and governors and small-town volunteer mayors spoke derisively of officials in Baghdad and Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, who left them with meager, if any, resources. Millions of Iraqis had to fend for themselves.
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