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Iraq: The Lost Generation

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More than four million Iraqis – that’s twenty per cent of the entire population – have been driven from their homes

Two million of them have become exiles from their own country, living desperate lives across the border in Syria and Jordan. This is the biggest and most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948 – and the long term consequences could be just as serious. Sharmeen Obeid-Chinoy goes on a journey in search of Iraq’s ‘lost generation’. These are the very people on whom the new, democratic Iraq was to be built – the professional middle classes: but forty per cent of Iraq’s middle class live as desperate refugees, driven out by sectarian violence. Sharmeen meets those who worked for the British and the Americans, and who had to flee for their lives. Trapped in a foreign country, the countries of the Coalition have turned their backs on them. Now, the wife of one ex fixer for the US says she misses Saddam, and her teenage kids tell her to go back to Baghdad and fight the Americans. And there are the children – the terribly burnt and mutilated victims of sectarian violence and coalition bombing. Medical refugees, whose young lives have been torn apart by the war. Twelve year old Ahed’s leg has been shredded to the bone by a roadside bomb, and he is terrified at the thought of having to return. We are told that Iraq is getting safer, but no one Sharmeen meets on this journey wants to go back. Trapped in poverty and hunger, driven to measures as desperate as prostitution, millions of Iraqis face a bleak future. Director: Ed Robbins.

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