Yousif Alhusseini raised his hand and the armed guard at the Qushtapa refugee camp waved through our SUV at the security gate as if we were VIPs. “They know me here,” says Alhusseini, a reporter for Alhurra, a broadcast news operation that covers Iraq. “I come here often,” he says, gesturing at the ramshackle shanties lining a gravel grid of paths where some 5,000 Syrian refugees live in a purgatory of poverty. “These places were supposed to be temporary,” Alhusseini says, “but we all know how that goes.”

Alhusseini would know. He is a seasoned broadcast journalist and veteran of numerous networks. He now covers the region for the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), where I am chairman of the board. The U.S. Congress set up the MBN in 2004 to provide objective, balanced news in the Middle East and North Africa, an area of the world where censorship is as common as an AK-47. I became the MBN chair just under a year ago and decided to visit several of the twenty-two markets we serve to learn more deeply about the organization. Erbi is my third stop and my only one in Iraq.

War, authoritarian rule and uprisings of one sort of another characterize the world that Alhusseini covers for Alhurra, MBN’s main news outlet. The capital of the Kurdish government, Erbil is an important MBN post, for it represents Alhurra’s eyes on Iraq. At one point, MBN had a significant journalistic presence in Baghdad but was forced to leave when its reporters received death threats because of an MBN investigative series on corruption among Iraq’s powerful clerics.

I first traveled to the Kurdish region as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune nearly thirty years ago.

Erbil also occupies a strategic geographical hot spot that borders Iran on the east, Turkey on the north, Syria to the west and Iraq to the south. As solid an ally as America will get in the region, Kurdistan’s soldiers, known as the peshmerga, helped repel ISIS forcers in Iraq after the terrorist group’s surprise and bloody drive to within thirty miles of Baghdad in 2014.

I first traveled to the Kurdish region as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune nearly thirty years ago. At the time, I felt I had stepped back into biblical times. A colleague and I in a Range Rover wandered down rustic trails through small primitive villages, forging rivers and creeks to go to Erbil and other areas near lines maintained by forces loyal to Iraq’s then dictator Saddam Hussein. We watched nearby shepherds usher flocks of sheep through fields covered with large stones and boulders staged by time and geology. A four-star hotel was one with heat.

Erbil is now far different. Saddam Hussein, of course, is gone, killed after America launched a war in Iraq. Modern four-star hotels and high-rises line four-lane paved highways here thanks in part to investments by America and others. A trip that once took two and a half days can be done in two and a half hours. Restaurants with sophistical contemporary Mediterranean menus compete with hole-in-the-wall cafés serving falafel near a beautiful ancient city now under restoration.

Yet the signs of wartime Iraq remain. Security checkpoints are as common as traffic lights. Hydraulic solid iron barricades rise from beneath the pavement as our SUV approaches the driveway leading to my hotel. Guards at the entrance routinely wave a bomb detection wand under our vehicle. Kurdish peshmerga soldiers with AK-47s slung over their shoulders stand posted nearby, skeptically staring at new faces. People here remember well how ISIS soldiers swept through Iraq and were only twenty miles away from the city not that long ago in a country where people measure time in centuries. Hostile Iranian Hezbollah militias now occupy the important oil depots at Kirkuk, an hour-and-a- half to the south.

*photo of Haidar Wadji Ismail and his grandson by James O’Shea*

For Haidar Wadji Ismail and his family in the Qushtapa camp, war really hasn’t ended. His family fled their homes in 2011 after the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt spawned similar demonstrations in Syria. The population protested unemployment, corruption and repression peacefully, but the situation soon turned violent. Syrian President Bashar Assad unleashed his army on his own people to crush the dissent. Fearing for their lives, Ismail and his extended family abandoned their homes for cars and busses that eventually landed them in the Qushtapa refugee camp in 2014. They have been here ever since.

Jerry-rigged antennas and tangled webs of overhead wires represent the only means of consistent contact with the outside world. Because they are illegal immigrants, they are not allowed outside of the walls of the well-worn streets of the camp. Ismail and his family members can’t work, either, although many residents of the camp set up businesses such as fruit and tomato or date stands inside the walls strung with concertina wire. They are paid $18 a month by the Kurdish government and aide groups. Ismail welcomes visitors with a smile.

“He wants to know if we would like to come into his home, Alhusseni says after we arrive. We accepted, and word of our presence spread quickly. The carpet on the floor and pillows that line the walls of his small place soon filled with members of his family young and old. Some of the children have never known life beyond the walls of this cramped small compound. In all, about ten families related to Ismail live in the camp. They eagerly show visitors copies of their United Nations applications for asylum to various places around the world, including Holland, where Ismail’s daughter lives. They share the numbers of their cell phones, and a woman soon appears with tea and grape juice to share with us. The grape juice was delicious.

When I asked Ismail what happened after he applied for asylum, he looks at me, smiles and says nonchalantly that “they’ve all been rejected.” But he quickly adds that he and his family members will keep trying. “We will go anywhere,” he says.

—James O’Shea

James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who now lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Five W’s Substack here.

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Any opinions or observations in this blog are purely those of the author and do not represent the official positions of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN) or of the U.S. State Department’s Agency for Global Media, which administers federal grants to the MBN.

A Purgatory of Poverty

I first traveled to the Kurdish region as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune nearly thirty years ago.