Traumatised Mosul mothers unable to breastfeed
KHAZIR,IRAQ: Wazira rocks her tiny baby pleadingly but he is inconsolable, crying for the milk his mother can neither produce herself nor buy in a camp near the Iraqi battleground city of Mosul.
“He’s been crying since he was born. He only stops when he’s so exhausted that he falls asleep,” the 24-year-old said, sheltering her baby Rakan from the scorching sun with a piece of white cloth.
“I cannot breastfeed him and I feel he’s never satisfied. There’s no good food to eat and no money to buy baby formula,” she said, sitting outside a clinics in Khazir camp. The camp southeast of Mosul, where Iraqi forces are deep into the eighth month of an operation against the Islamic State group, is crammed with around 32,000 people displaced from the city.
Conditions in Khazir, one of the largest displacement camps around Mosul are difficult. Temperatures soaring past 43 Celsius add to Rakan’s discomfort. “Sometimes I pound the biscuits they give us at the camp into powder and mix them with water to try to feed him by force,” said the young mother.
A few metres down the queue, Marwa is also waiting for her turn to take her eightmonth-old daughter to a doctor. The 25-year-old mother, who fled west Mosul with her family two weeks earlier, already had no maternal milk to give Maryam five months ago.
“These past few months made me very tired, we kept moving from house to house until we finally managed to get out,” she said, as the line of haggard-looking mothers holding their wailing babies curled around the clinic.