TAKE ME OUT OF THE CAMP
Moment Syrian refugee girl begged aid worker for help
HER big brown eyes full of desperate hope, a young girl begs to be taken away from the horrors of an Iraqi refugee camp.
The Kurdish child, who gave her name as Rosheen, repeatedly approached a British aid worker in her determination to leave. Looking up at him, she softly asks: ‘Take me out of the camp.’
Ravinder Singh, the founder of Slough-based Khalsa Aid, posted a video of the heartbreaking encounter with the girl.
He wrote online: ‘This beautiful Kurdish refugee girl came over to me three times speaking in Kurdish, I got a translator to help me.
‘It was so heartbreaking to hear of her plea to leave the refugee camp. These are #OurChildren, not faceless beings.’
The Bardarash refugee camp, in
Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, is now home to more than 12,000 refugees from neighbouring Syria.
Numbers have swelled in the region after the Turkish offensive in northern Syria. As winter closes in, temperatures are bitterly cold and there are struggles to supply the camps with fresh water.
Rosheen, whose age is unknown, told aid workers her father is still in Derik – also known as Al-Malikiyah – in north-east Syria.
Mr Singh, whose aid organisation is helping to distribute food and hundreds of thousands of litres of fresh water daily, said: ‘We are providing hot meals on the Iraq-Syria border. The refugees usually cross the border at night where they have to pay gunmen to cross.
‘Then they walk for several hours. It’s becoming bitterly cold and many reach the Kurdish side shivering and at times wet too during the rain. It’s a terrible situation.’
Yesterday the Joint Crisis Coordination Centre of the Kurdistan Regional Government said 15,000 refugees had arrived in the area in the weeks since the Turkish offensive began last month. New arrivals brought the total number of Syrian refugees there to 226,000, it added.