Life begins again in NZ for war refugees
As he fled in his car through the streets of the Iraqi capital, bullets ricocheting around him on his way to work, Zaid Al-Jarrah came to the reluctant realisation it was time to leave.
In 2009, the communications engineer who had trained and worked in Europe was working for a government department when he was threatened by militia.
“I just try to run away from them, they shoot my car and I didn’t stop driving until I reached one of the checkpoints and the other car just disappeared.”
His wife, Wagha Abdulraheem AlSalihi, at home with her baby, narrowly missed being in the October 2009 bombings outside the Ministry of Justice that killed 155 people, including many children, and injured hundreds of others.
Al-Jarrah wanted to help rebuild his country, plagued with sectarian violence since the US-led ousting of President Saddam Hussein in 2003 — but staying was no longer a choice.
In 2010 the couple fled with their baby Nisreen Zaid and toddler Fahad Zaid, seeking asylum in Cairo.
Life in the Egyptian capital was “hard”, as refugees they had no right to work and no regular source of income.
In 2015 they were relocated to New Zealand.
Today Al-Jarrah is halfway through a two-year master’s degree.
Al-Salihi continues to improve her English and dreams of getting a job once her youngest, Layan, 2, goes to school.
His eldest two speak English with only the slightest hint of an accent. Fahad hopes to become a building engineer, Nisreen a dentist.
While Al-Jarrah is happy and secure with life here, he finds it hard thinking of his relatives scattered across the globe.
“We always hope things will pass and everything will go better — and everything go worse — the problem doesn’t finish.”
Every time you start again is hard, but I hope after this first few years we can be in a better situation. Zaid Al-Jarrah
He said his parents and one brother lived in Baghdad, the other floated between the Iraqi capital and Egypt.
His sister-in-law had fled Mosul — a key battleground between jihadist group Islamic State (Isis) and the Iraqi Government — for Turkey. His brotherin-law was in Canada.
As a student in New Zealand he said it was still sometimes a struggle to make ends meet, but Al-Jarrah is optimistic.
“Every time you start again is hard, but I hope after this first few years we can be in a better situation.”