David Pratt in Iraq: The determined desire for normality in the midst of war

So many of those escaping Mosul are children. How I wish those MPs who voted against the reopening of the Dubs Transfer scheme on child refugees this week could be here right now to witness the plight of these youngsters.

How many of those politicians I wonder, have ever encountered the likes of the children I have come across caught in the crossfire of the struggle for Mosul?

It’s not that such an insight is necessary to understand the needs of such desperate people, it’s just that it put things into a sharper perspective.

Three days ago, around the time Parliament was voting on the Dubs scheme, I watched a little boy disembark from a bus along with other families fleeing the ferocious fighting that now engulfs their neighbourhoods in west Mosul.

The boy was no more than 10 years old and totally alone. In the chaos, confusion and panic as he and his family scurried out of the city under fire, they had become separated. I photographed that little boy, whose name I still don’t know.

Only subsequently did I learn of his circumstances from a local aid worker.

Even if I hadn’t photographed him, his face will stay in my mind’s eye for a long time to come, the tears streaming down his cheeks, the sheer helplessness in his eyes. His pain was heartbreaking, his vulnerability overwhelming.

What must be going though that boy’s mind right now as he wonders whether his parents are alive or dead? What if he finds himself totally alone in a country at war, the future of which is as uncertain right now as his own?

His tragic story is only one of many. One Iraqi man I spoke with a few days ago told of how he, his family and others, crossed the River Tigris in the darkness of night in small boats, but were spotted by Islamic State (IS) fighters who opened fire on them. Some of their friends around them fell into the water and drowned, or were killed by bullets.

War is no respecter of age, class, gender or financial circumstance, but those already the poorest and most vulnerable bear its brunt worst of all.

Rarely have they the savings to tide them over for a while should they have to flee or rebuild their homes and lives. For the poorest there is no safety net, and so often no way out.

Last weekend in our sister paper the Sunday Herald, I told the story of a young couple, whose seven-month-old son, Abdu Rahman, had been born under the brutal rule of IS fighters in Mosul.

His father, Salim, had made a modest wage working in a tile factory before the jihadists entered his family’s life and those of his neighbours. As prices within Mosul rocketed because of the siege, he and his wife struggled to survive, and were unable to afford the powdered milk their tiny son needed.

Right now Abdu Rahman and his parents are living under canvas in a tented camp east of Mosul. The little boy has spent just a month of his short time on this planet free from the horrors of IS rule.

So haunted by the executions they witnessed and privations they experienced, his parents say they will never return to Mosul. What then is to become of this couple, their young son and countless others like them uprooted by Iraq’s seemingly endless wars?

These are people whose lives were modest but peaceful. They shared the hopes and aspirations we all do. They stayed at home but still had war brought to them by barbarous men and women. As a reporter I have long since come to realise that war is about more than what we journalists sometimes flippantly call the “bang bang”.

It is about people struggling to feed their children, keep them safe, educate them and keep a roof over their heads, doing all they can to keep their loved ones out of harm’s way. If that means upping sticks, fleeing across countries, oceans and continents so be it. Who among us can honestly say we would not do the same, if it meant keeping alive those that matter most to us?

A few days ago in a hospital where casualties of the war are taken, I came across a 52-year-old man called Asud Ali Saeed, whose home is in the bitterly contested al-Maamoun quarter of |Mosul.

Just recently he was shot in the abdomen by an IS sniper. As the fighting subsided after Iraqi troops moved into his neighbourhood, Asud Ali decided it was safe to go outside and stepped on to the pavement at the entrance to his house, and was wounded.

Asked why he had done this, he told me nonchalantly he was clearing up the mess outside. This he was about to do in a city where countless streets sit surrounded by canyons of bomb blasted ruins.

His explanation was so typical of what I’ve encountered time and again in war zones, that desire by ordinary people to reassert order and normality, no matter what.

This past week while travelling through areas slowly being liberated from IS rule by the Iraqi army, I’ve been struck by just how determined ordinary people are to go about resurrecting their everyday lives. Often with gunfire and explosions still reverberating from neighbourhoods where the Iraqi Army advance continues and IS puts up its fight to the death, stalls and shops slowly reopen and people, like moss in the crevices of a crag, cling on to normality.

So often as a reporter it feels that the emphasis of our coverage should be on how people die through war, when how they live through war is so often far more telling and revealing.

Within the next few hours I’ll be packing to leave Iraq and start that jarring journey back to my own normality.

Mosul is not yet liberated from the tyranny of IS rule. Even when it is, things will be far from peaceful in Iraq. As always I will leave with mixed feelings wondering what will become of those Iraqis that I met while here, not least that little boy on the bus, lost and cast adrift from his family. For some people war has a cruel way of depriving normality from ever returning. I so hope he is not one of them and finds both his family and his life.