by Michele Naar-Obed

Throughout the mountains in northern Iraq, villagers flee from ongoing bombing and shelling by Turkish forces.  Turkey's battles with the Kurdish Worker Party (PKK) continue to wreak havoc on the villagers caught in the crossfire.  They stream south to Internally Displaced People's (IDP) camps; when there is a lull in the bombing, they stream back up the mountain to their homes.

A nine ton unexploded bomb sits deep in the earth in the Qandil Mountain region.  Following the bombing there last December, some villagers returned home to discover that their goats' milk contained poisons.  They found 186 baby goats dead.  Mam Hasan, from Levce said that his goats grazed in the area where Turkish aircraft had bombed.  He and other villagers attribute the decimation of their animal herds to the bombings, but since the KRG (Kurdish Regional Government) lacks the equipment to do proper testing, Kurds cannot prove the link.

Many of those caught in the crossfire between the Mehdi militia and Iraqi and Coalition forces are leaving Sadr City in southern Iraq.  Of those who have fled, approximately 200 Arab and Kurdish families find themselves living in an overcrowded, garbage-filled IDP tent camp in Suleimaniya.  The IDPs claim they can find no work, so some sell material aid brought by NGOs; others sell their clothes.  Some of the women have become prostitutes and some parents send their children into the city to beg.  This site is only one of many IDP camps - throngs of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers caught in the crossfire.