Public Story
Orphans of War in Mosul
Iraq´s Forgotten Casualties
Children orphaned in battle with ISIS: Ten of thousands of o children lost their parents under Islamic State rule or the battle against it. Iraq has few resources to care for them. The children of Iraq are in crisis.
Tens of thousands of Iraqi children lost their parents under the brutality of the Islamic State and the prolonged battles to wrest Iraqi territory from its rule. But unlike the government soldiers who fought those battles, who are honored with memorials in almost every town, these children are at risk of being forgotten casualties of the war. The Iraqi state has few resources for these victims, and the country’s ravaged communities, still scrambling to rebuild basic services like health care and electricity, are too overwhelmed to handle the orphans’ needs. An estimated 800,000 were orphaned by the end of the Iraq War. The invasion by ISIS displaced more than 1.3 million. Thousands work on the streets, in homes, or in businesses.
Iraq is at very high risk of having yet another "lost generation" as the United Nation's children's charity, UNICEF, revealed that close to 800,000 Iraqi children had lost one or both parents as a result of the continuing instability, chaos, and incessant violence that has wracked Iraq since the country was invaded and occupied by US-led western forces in 2003.