Leaving Violence Behind, 5th Grader Returns to School
Kerrar Fathil, 11, doesn’t talk with his friends at school about what happened to his family back in Iraq.
In the summer of 2003, four months after a U.S.-led coalition of armed forces occupied the country, masked Iraqi men woke up Kerrar and his family in the middle of the night in their home in Baghdad. They took away the boy’s father, a retired civil servant who had recently been trained as a policeman. Kerrar, his mother, and two of his six sisters soon fled to Syria and then on to Amman, Jordan. The youngster never saw his father again.
The family is among the estimated half million Iraqis now living in Jordan, according to Imran Riza, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees . In a Feb. 3 interview, he said that only in this past year has the international community really started to pay attention to the plight of Iraqis displaced by the war. Only about 100,000 of the Iraqis living in Jordan now were here before 2003,...
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