When ISIS militias swept into Mosel, Iraq, in June 2014, Ibrahim Mahmoud plotted his flight, along with his whole family, which included 11 children. Once upon a time, Ibrahim was himself a child escaping another violent campaign carried out by equally angry militias.
In his lifetime, Ibrahim became a refugee twice, once when he was nine-years-old living in Haifa, Palestine, and yet again and more recently, in Mosel.
Just weeks before Israel declared its independence in 1948, Ibrahim lost his homeland, and fled Haifa, along with tens of thousands of Palestinian Muslims and Christians, after Israeli militias conquered the city in a military operation they called Bi’ur Hametz, or Passover Cleaning.
Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from or fled the horrors of the militias-instigated war, and those who are still alive along with their descendants, number over five million refugees.
Between 1948 and 2014, life was anything but kind to Ibrahim and his family. At first, they sold falafel, and his children left school to join the work force at a young age. They all had cards that listed them as “Palestinian refugees”, and to date know of no other identity.
When the Americans invaded Iraq in 2003, they granted their soldiers and the Shia militias a free hand in that Arab country. The once relatively thriving and peaceful Palestinian community of refugees in Iraq was shattered. Now, according to the UN Refugee’s Agency,no more than 3,000 Palestinian refugees are still living in Iraq, many of them in refugee camps.