THE current situation in Iraq and Syria is undeniably volatile, complicated and dangerous.
Radical group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), also known as ISIL, last week seized control of every major border crossing between the two countries, as well as a number of towns and military bases in Iraq’s western province.
Just yesterday, ISIS announced the establishment of a “caliphate”, which is a system that sees a ‘caliph’ — ISIS leader Baghdadi — given absolute power and total ruling authority over Muslims.
The group’s spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani described the caliphate as “the dream in all Muslims’ hearts” and “the hope of all jihadists” - but that means little to the thousands of people living in temporary displacement camps across the country because they were born into a different religion or ethnic group.
AP reported that the militant group’s surge of power and control across Iraq “has thrown the country into its deepest crisis since US troops withdrew in December 2011, and threatens to carve the nation in three along sectarian and ethnic lines.”
Malaysian PM Najib Razak struck a discordant note when he recently praised the courage of the ISIL fighters and urged his Umno party members to emulate them.
Militants gesture next to the bodies of handcuffed and blindfolded dead men laying on the ground of the Aleppo headquarters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) after they were allegedly executed by the al-Qaeda-linked group, in the northern city of Aleppo, on January 8, 2014
(Photo : youtube /Screen Grab )
More than 1 million displaced - 80% are women and young children
It is all too easy, from our safe houses, to disassociate ourselves from a war happening halfway across the globe. We can get lost in the extremist claims populating mainstream and social media, and put the conflict down to something between men with covered faces, sporting guns.
But the reality of the situation is that terrified men, women and children have fled their homes across Iraq and Syria, streaming into temporary displacement camps rather than staying to submit to militant control.
The UN Refugee agency estimates that there are 1 million internally displaced people and 110,000 stateless people in Iraq alone, and the Red Crescent Society pegs over 80 per cent of them as women and young children.
Iraqi federal police increased their presence last week after ISIS action. They’re pictured here on patrol alongside local children pushing their bikes in the town of Taji, Iraq. Photo: Karim Kadim Source: AP
The faces of war
The amazing pictures you will see below, captured by news photographers in the region, tell a story we will never be able to. Children in temporary displacement camps, children caught by roadside bombs, children scrambling to get food as they enter into the Ramadan period.
These are the faces of war.
A seriously wounded Syrian boy looks on as he is treated at a makeshift hospital on June 28, 2014, following a reported car bomb explosion at a popular market in the town of Douma. Photo: ABD DOUMANY Source: AFP
Another Syrian boy, caught in the same explosion. Photo: ABD DOUMANY Source: AFP
A young girl covers her mouth at a camp for displaced Iraqis in the Khazer area outside Irbil, northern Iraq, on Sunday. Source: AP
Iraqi children look out of the window of their car as they wait to get into a temporary displacement camp in Khazair, Iraq, last Thursday. Photo: Spencer Platt Source: Getty Images
Children at the Khazair displacement camp chasing a Red Crescent society truck delivering food and other items on June 30. Source: Getty Images
Children sit on disassembled tent at a camp for displaced Iraqi Shiite Turkmen who fled their town of Tal Afar, in Shikhan, in Kurdistan's Dohuk province, last week. Photo: KARIM SAHIB Source: AFP
Syrian refugee Youmna, 4, and her brother Ammar, 3, outside their tent at a Syrian refugee camp in the eastern town of Marj in Bekaa valley, Lebanon, on Sunday. Photo: Bilal Hussein Source: AP
Iraqi displaced children play at a temporary camp on June 27, 2014 in Aski kalak, 40 kms west of the Kurdish autonomous region's capital Arbil. Photo: KARIM SAHIB Source: AFP
Displaced Iraqi boys wait for a sunset communal meal to break their fast during the first day of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan on Sunday in the Khazer area outside Irbil, northern Iraq. Photo: Hussein Malla Source: AP
A displaced Iraqi Christian girl who fled with 2000 other Christians from Hamdania to this temporary shelter in Ainkawa, Irbil on Saturday, June 28, 2014. Photo: Hussein Malla Source: AP
A girl waits for food and other items being dispensed by the Iraqi Red Crescent society on June 30, 2014, at an IDP camp in Khazair, Iraq. Photo: Spencer Platt Source: Getty Images
Iraqi children who fled their village with their family rest near their car outside of Mosul as they try to enter the Kurdish-controlled city of Irbil, in northern Iraq. Photo: Hussein Malla Source: AP
Shiite Turkmen children taking refuge in the central Shiite Muslim shrine city of Najaf in Sunday. Photo: HAIDAR HAMDANI Source: AFP
- Agencies
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