First, I went to Iraq in November 2014 and had a chance to visit different camps and compare the situation there.
Before I go on to what I witnessed I want to let you know that just like Dalal, I was a refugee. I lived in camps in Syria after the Gulf War, so I have experienced life in camps.
But once I went into Iraq I could not help but weep at what I found. It was nothing like the camp I was in. It was heartbreaking seeing 14 people having to work and live inside two camps. Sisters and brothers, one of them was 27 years old and the other was 14 and the whole family had to fit into two tiny camps. They had two little mattresses and both of them would get extremely cold at night, extremely hot in summer, but there was nothing to help them relieve that condition.
I took pictures of food and I would be happy to send them. A family of 14 would receive a stack of rice, flour, and sugar and that was it for a month.
I went to another camp. They said they'd been here for three months and had not received anything.
Other people have commented that due to corruption not much humanitarian aid is getting to the right people, those who are definitely in need. To hold people accountable there needs to be a system in place to check into where that humanitarian aid is going .
I work with a non-profit organization and we are constantly in touch with people in Iraq and asking them what kind of help they are most in need of. Some of the things they need are basic food, basic items, but also medical attention. Because of the conditions they're living in, because of the summer heat, different issues are coming up,so they definitely need medical help.
In addition to that there are remote areas like Mount Sinjar. Because of some discrimination, because of the choice of their not wanting to work with certain political parties, the local forces there make it difficult for different non-profit organizations to go into that region and provide them with the help they need.
If the conditions that Yazidis have been living in for the past two years were okay, many of the thousands of Yazidis would not be taking the fifty-fifty chance of crossing the dangerous seas to try to get to Europe. I cannot give an exact number but there have been many cases in the past year of people drowning in hopes of crossing into Europe for a better life.