Angelina Jolie Asking the Global Community for Help for Refugees and Displaced Victims
Angelina Jolie is requesting worldwide action and attention for Iraqis and Syrian refugees after visiting the camps in January. The 39-year-old filmmaker and special envoy of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), expressed her concerns in a New York Times column, regarding her experience while visiting the refugee camps.
In the column, Jolie expresses the recapping of her tour of the Khanke refugee camp that is located in northern Iraq and the changes the camp has gone through since her last visit in 2012. Jolie has visited Iraq on five different occasions in the past since 2007. Khanke shelters Iraqi refugees and 50,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to the camp due to war conflict in Syria.
“I have seen nothing like the suffering I’m witnessing now,” Jolie expressed in the column. “For many years I have visited camps, and every time, I sit in a tent and hear stories. I try my best to give support. To say something that will show solidarity and give some kind of thoughtful guidance. On this trip I was speechless.”
According to the United Nations, it is estimated that 3.3 million people have been displaced in Iraq since the decade of conflict in their region.
Jolie describes in her column how the “refugees and displaced people have witnessed unspeakable brutality” that “the children are out of school, they are struggling to survive, and they are surrounded on all sides by violence”.
According to Jolie’s column, she states that countries surrounding the region should offer a safe haven to the most vulnerable refugees and for the global community to come together and work on a peace settlement. She notes that the United Nations is underfunded.
