Simon Jacob reporting with the Global Youth Peacemaker Tour from Iraq.
Meriam was born in Baghdad in 1988. She spent 20 years in the capital of the almost tripartite Iraq, a structure that gets more and more uncertain with each day of the reign of terror of Islamic State.
Later the family moved to Karakosch near Mosul. The student of linguistics lived there for five years before on August 20th all hell broke loose on the young Christian and entire indigenous population groups, such as the Yazidi.
After the Islamic State (Daesh) had overrun the Sunni city of Mosul finding little resistance, they attacked the surrounding Christian villages. About 100.000 Christians were forced to leave their home. Meriam and her whole family met the same fate.
Many of them not even had the opportunity to take along the simplest belongings. Stricken with pain and sorrow, the utterless hopless refugees are now living in the autonomous region of Kurdistan, which offered them protection, a roof over their head, and food. But the people need more than that. Above all it is the women and children who have to leave the country without future. But most of them don´t want to go, as we have heard in many conversations. They want to go back home. Until the day when this is possible, Meriam has decided to help the most vulnerable.
She fights for more than just food and a warm blanket in the NGO “International Committee For The Rights of Indigenous Mesopotamians”, short ICRIM, which is supported by the government and also has close ties to Amnesty International and the UNHCR. The education of women and children is important to her. Currently this means taking care of 200 women within the organization’s program. They are supported and lent psychological assistance by setting up a new vocational perspective. For example by learning manual skills to produce goods for daily use that can be sold.
Meriam looks plain if you look at her physical constitution. But she has a great heart and an immense will to never give up.
It is her goal to enable a future for those who don´t have anything.
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