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THOUSANDS OF MUSLIMS GATHER FOR EID AL-FITR PRAYERS IN IRAQ

📸 Thousands of Muslims gather for Eid al-Fitr prayers at the Holy shrine of Imam Hussein, the third Shia Imam, in the city of Karbala, in central Iraq.

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The Awafi Kitchen is where Arab and Jewish cuisine are one. They are part of the Iraqi Jewish community and are based in Boston, USA. All of their family were displaced from Iraq between 1950 and 1970. The following statement and photograph were posted on the Facebook page of the Awafi Kitchen, and was titled ‘Our Return to Iraq’.

“Last month, after five decades away, members of our family finally walked the streets in Baghdad, the city they once called home. Out of hundreds  of us in diaspora across the world, we were the first in our family to set foot in Baghdad since our waves of displacement between the 50s and 70s.

The trip was every feeling all at once. Pure joy, gratitude, and reconnection, inextricable from the grief and pain of facing our decades of separation, and seeing much of our family’s hometown deeply changed. 

Our whole lives we’ve dreamed of witnessing the beautiful Baghdad we have been painted in memories. We found beauty, but also bore witness to the impact of decades of war, the US occupation, and ongoing resource extraction, and how this has limited the place’s ability to thrive.

That being said, the people we met were incredible. We spent two weeks surrounded by an abundance of love and warmth everywhere we went. There's beautiful new realities rebuilding. Iraqis returning, Iraqis who have stayed through it all. 

Tender moments of mutual curiosity and excitement: younger Iraqis eager to learn about the old Baghdad of our family’s youth, the lost Jewish history of the city, and in turn our family eager to learn what it’s like to live as an Iraqi in the contemporary world. And ultimately, as friends reminded us, we accomplished our goal: it was just about touching foot to earth, and that we did.

[ Issue 24.2 ] 

The Republic of Iraq remains severely contaminated with explosive ordnance (EO) according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor report 2019. Located in southern Iraq, the Iraq Directorate of Mine Action’s (DMA) Regional Mine Action Center South’s (RMAC-S) area of responsibility contains the most contaminated area in Iraq in terms of surface area. The region’s hazard areas recorded in the national mine action database (IMSMA) stood at 1,592 sq km by mid-July 2020, with the Basra Province alone containing 1.27 billion sq m of hazard area. This contamination predominantly originates from various armed conflicts in the region, ranging mostly from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s to the 2003 Iraq War. The region has seen relatively little conflict with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which bodes well for regional security but means funding for conventional minefield clearance is limited.

From a natural hazard perspective, the region is exposed to a range of natural and human-induced disasters, e.g., droughts, floods, sand-storms, desertification, and various epidemics. Compounding the situation is the country’s poor economic situation, infrastructure, and unreliable internet connectivity. In addition to navigating the contamination hazards mentioned previously, RMAC-S is tasked with prioritizing land release activities based on, inter alia, the socioeconomic status, population vulnerability, and development sectors’ activities that are restricted by the hazardous areas within each district. The presence of minefields in the region’s large oil fields, on which the government relies heavily, further hampers the effective management of mine action resources available to RMAC-S.

ROLE OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Timely access to relevant information is a key enabler for effective decision-making in any organization and even more so when these decisions affect lives and livelihoods. Since 2004, iMMAP has supported and developed the humanitarian mine action (HMA) program’s information management (IM) systems, delivered capacity building activities and facilitated coordination on IM, planning and prioritization between the DMA and other HMA actors in Iraq. Balancing  the access restrictions and security requirements imposed by the government on the national mine action database contents, DMA’s activities created an array of information products that provided decision makers with easier access to data subsets, assisting with data analysis and the contextualization of the hazard areas. The previous system resulted in delayed responses from fully-taxed personnel when staff from RMAC-S operations are met with urgent requests for planning or mine action tasks submitted by implementing partners. The shortfalls of the national budget contribute to the difficulty of retaining skilled national IM staff, complicating the DMA’s operating capacity, and further delaying the output of (paper-based) field report submissions stemming from the problematic infrastructure.

ISIS may not be as “defeated” in Iraq as you thought. Our Iraq control map reports are back, and the first 2020 update is free!