No water, no jobs: ISIL survivors struggle in northern Iraq

When Father Ammar Yako, a Syriac Catholic priest in the majority-Assyrian Christian town of Qaraqosh in northern Iraq, returned to his church in 2016 he found its floors covered in rubble and its artwork pillaged. The economy is static in the city.” After fleeing the ISIL onslaught, many Christians who returned to their millennia-old towns in northern Iraq’s Nineveh Plains have found themselves unable to make a living amid a depressed post-war economic environment. “Iraq is very rich in agriculture as well as on the industrial side, but all are dying because of.” ‘Administrative corruption’ Warda, an Assyrian Christian herself, lamented inefficiencies, delays in providing farmers with seeds, and a general lack of investment by the Iraqi state in rebuilding communities and supporting farmers in northern Iraq in the post-ISIL years. All our farms rely on rain and the Lord.” ‘Dust bowl’ The United Nations Environment Programme called Iraq the “fifth most vulnerable country in the world” to several climate change-related factors in a 2019 report. “We have a proverb that says ‘two blows on the head hurt’,” said Akad Alkhodedy, a resident of Qaraqosh, “which means a human can deal with one challenge, but two problems become hard to take.