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EnhanceTV :: Educational TV :: Current Affairs :: Cutting Edge: Iraq - The Lost Generation

Cutting Edge: Iraq - The Lost Generation

In the past five years more than four million Iraqis - 20 per cent of the entire population - have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed. Two million now live in exile across the border in Syria and Jordan. Iraq: The Lost Generation investigates the biggest and most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948.

Award-winning journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy travels to Syria and Jordan to investigate the plight of Iraqi refugees. The very people on whom the new, democratic Iraq was to be built - the professional middle classes - nearly half of whom now live as desperate refugees, driven out by the violence and civil breakdown.

Sharmeen meets former translators who worked for British and American troops and as a result have had to flee for their lives. Trapped in a foreign country, their glowing army recommendations appear apparently worthless as the countries they risked their lives to support have now turned their backs on them. The wife of a building contractor who worked for the US now says she misses Saddam - her teenage children want to return to Baghdad to fight the Americans.

In Amman, Sharmeen visits some of the worst-injured Iraqi children - burnt, mutilated and horrifically disfigured - these are some of the youngest victims of both the war and sectarian violence. The thought of returning to Iraq terrifies 12-year-old Ahed, whose leg has been shredded to the bone by a roadside bomb, an injury so awful that he cannot bring himself to look at it.

Every refugee Sharmeen meets has an anguished tale to tell - from the mobile-phone shop owner who was gunned down and left paralysed by religious fanatics to the Christian family whose life of middle class comfort has been exchanged for the misery of refugee subsistence in sub-zero temperatures. And there's the former Shia policeman who was tortured by sectarian militia, and whose marriage to his Kurdish wife forced the entire family to evacuate.

We are told that Iraq is getting safer, but no-one Sharmeen meets on her journey wants to go back. And they face a bleak future with less than a one per cent chance of being resettled in a Western country. (From the UK, in English, and Arabic, English subtitles) (Documentary)