Isolated Sinjaris call for more development assistance

Go to the main street of the northern Iraqi governorate of Dahuk any time after 6.30 in the morning, and you will find a crowd of men, anything up to 300, waiting at the kerb. Many of them will be there all day, smoking, talking, doing nothing. This is Dahuk’s informal labour exchange, where building constructors in need of extra hands, come to find workmen. Every decent sized Iraqi town has one, though few are as obvious as the one in Dahuk. But what makes the set up in this far northwestern city so unusual is that barely any of the men waiting are local. Almost all are from Sinjar, the largely rural district stretching west from Mosul as far as the Syrian border. They come here, they say, because there is no work to be had back home. “It is the height of the farming year now, the cotton harvest," Adil Shemu, a farm labourer from Gobel, a collective town of 35,000 people, told IRIN in Dahuk. “Even so, I think over half the population has no work.” “The situation has been getting worse for years,” added his friend Jirdo Brahim. “It has come to the point where you spend as much buying seed as you earn selling the crop,” he told IRIN. Complaints like this are common from farmers throughout the north of Iraq. In the case of Sinjar, though, say observers, there is none of the usual tendency to exaggerate. “This is a really, really under developed area,” Robert Anderson, country manager for the NGO Concern for Kids (C4K), based in Georgia, USA, told IRIN. “A lot of the villages around Sinjar are lacking even basic things like a drinking water supply.” The region is backward for all sorts of reasons. Perched in the remote northern triangle of Nineveh governorate, it formed part of Baghdad-controlled Iraq until last spring. Unlike nearby Mosul, though, this was not a Sunni Arab area favoured by the former regime. Its population is not only Kurdish, but largely non-Muslim - Sinjar is the heartland of Iraq’s Yezidi minority, an ethnically Kurdish group whose religion is a synthesis of paganism, pre-Islamic fire worship and elements from Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Believed to number around 200,000, Iraq’s Yezidis had a hard time under the Baath party, many of them forced by the state to carry I.D. cards describing them as ethnically Arab. But liberation did not end their problems. Living next to the heartlands of support for the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Sinjaris have a reputation for being partisans of the KDP’s arch-rival, the more secular-minded Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). At least two of the ministers in PUK-controlled Sulaymaniyah are Yezidis from Sinjar. In Dahuk's labour market, it is not difficult to find men who impute the absence of any improvement in services since last year to political differences. Others put it down to the anti-Yezidi feeling that has always been present among Sunni Kurds, particularly in the socially conservative region around Dahuk. “Barely a day goes past here without one of us being insulted,” complained Milham Hussein Ahmad, a Sinjari who has spent the past 60 days touting for work in Dahuk and 60 nights sleeping on a nearby hotel roof with three dozen compatriots. “The local people call us dirty, and tell us to go home, and the foremen pay us half as much as they pay local workers,” he added. When they get work at all. Most Sinjaris in Dahuk say they consider three days of work a week at 15,000 Iraqi dinars (US $10) a day a good week. But the main reason for the lack of services back home has little to do with Muslim Kurdish prejudice. Cut off from Kurdish areas by Mosul lake, Sinjar has only two access routes: one a dusty and previously dangerous road following the Syrian border; the other through Mosul, one of Iraq’s most violent cities. “Before, you were safe enough once you got to Sinjar,” said C4K’s Robert Anderson. “Now security has deteriorated even there.” C4K was forced to abandon plans for emergency water projects in Sinjar early this summer. Now, Sinjaris say, only the US army continues to provide aid, but at far too slow a rate. “I can’t see much future for our region,” sighed Adil Shemu. His colleagues nodded in agreement.