Voices from the Field - IRC Blog

November, 11, 2007. Amman, Jordan As Ibrahim begins his afternoon prayers in the bare room where his family sleeps, his precocious two year old daughter Raim curls up on the edge of his rug.Adra, Ibrahim’s wife, looks on laughing from the small adjacent room where we are sitting. “This has become Raim’s little ritual,” she tells me.  Ibrahim tries to concentrate, eventually breaking into a smile at the squirming giggling girl at his feet.Raim was a year old when her family fled to Jordan.  Her little brother, Salim, was born in a poor neighborhood in Amman that has become home to tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees.  They are beautiful and affectionate children, and thankfully, unaware of their parents’ suffering.

Ibrahim and Adra were still newlyweds when the bitter and bloody sectarian violence in Iraq began turning their lives upside down.  Ibrahim became a Sunni when he married Adra.  Such conversions were very common at the time.  Suddenly the practice had become a death sentence.

To make matters worse, Ibrahim started receiving threats from a local militia because of his political views. “I told a few too many people that confrontation isn’t the answer and that we must be willing to talk to and learn from our enemies,” Ibrahim explains, adding that several of his close friends had been killed for promoting negotiation.

When he discovered that his family was on a hit list, he made a fast and painful decision to leave.  The couple quickly said good-bye to their families and headed to Jordan.

Since then, Adra’s father and younger brother have been murdered.  The rest of her family fled to a Sunni neighborhood on the outskirts of Baghdad.  They can no longer visit Ibrahim’s family, who remain in a Shia district.

“I hate these words Shia and Sunni. They mean nothing to me other than the reason why innocent people are killed,” Adra says.  “My brother, he had a job selling ice-cream to children from his bicycle.  They gunned him down while he was selling ice-cream.”

Salim crawls into his mother’s lap–a welcome but fleeting distraction from this terrible story.  “It hurts my heart so much, the death of my little brother,” she continues after Salim scurries away. “I have lost the one I loved the most.”

Ibrahim says he and Adra feel alone in Amman, with few friends, no family and no rights.   Ibrahim suffers from asthma, but because he cannot get a viable job, he cannot afford medical treatment.  In fact, he says any money he manages to make with odd jobs goes to rent and diapers. They can barely afford food.

“We want to start a new life somewhere else – some place where my children can grow up in peace,” Ibrahim tells me. “We can’t go home.  And there is no future for us here.”

Learn how the International Rescue Committee is assisting Iraqi refugees here