Child Labor in Iraq

After the world entered 2018 three months ago, Iraq seems to be stuck in 18th century. Illiteracy are at a worldwide low, I have yet to find anyone speaking Arabic correctly, you see in every Arab country there are two kinds of Arabic spoken, the native one and the one we're taught in school. it's the latter that seems to have faded entirely, it's only spoken in T.V. While that doesn't seem to be a problem as we're still talking and the ideas are still understood during conversations but it is an indicator of how bad the education is in Iraq. Not being able to speak the school Arabic means that you can't read it to the full. Let me put it in prospective my extended family from both my father and mother side only I have graduated high school along with only six cousins, that's 7 out of a whipping total of 49 people who are over 20 in age. And while most of those have done it by choice, the remaining along with the many children we find in the streets of Iraq have done it by force.

23% of people in Iraq are illiterate (That's people who can't write or read) and while I can get further into that but it is a subject on it's on. Now there are no clear stats regarding what I'm going to say next but in the Safe House charity that I founded along with a guy named Hisham we have found at least 2,000 kids aged 6-12 who are illiterate. and a high number of those are currently working be it at a car garage, selling stuff on the streets,pushing carts for shoppers at markets and straight out begging for money in front of restaurants. A lot of those kids have no idea how to manage finances (obviously) and so are forced to sleep on the streets.

Kids sleeping where they work (Mainly the street) are at risks of health crises and there seems to be little care about them from people around. A case and point is this kid Hassan Ali who we found five months ago coughing his lounges out and unable to move as people kept walking by. Luckily Hisham was driving around the area buying school equipment and winter clothes for the children at our charity and has come across the guy, Hisham took him to a hospital where we found out that the kid had pneumonia, which was made worse by the countless other diseases he had most notably the rashes on his body due to the lack of washing as and this is according to the child himself "Hasn't taken a shower for almost three years", fortunely for the kid (And us) the kid got the treatments he needed and he's reciting with us.

Child labor in Iraq is a big danger as I can't even begin to count the numbers of threats that we have gotten from what can only be described as kids mafias. Those mafias take kids from the streets who have run away from abusive parents, take them in and then hire them on the streets as beggars in exchange of giving them a place to stay in. Those mafias take it a step further as they usually have a man who's nicknamed "The Doctor" who's job is to give those children injuries so they are more suitable for people giving them money, those injuries can go as far as amputating those kids, be it an ear, fingers and sometimes can go as far as arms and legs.

As disgusting as that behavior is it's still not the worst that could happen, as those mafias are often approached by rich man and gangs to blow something up, It was 2 years ago when an explosion happened in Baghdad that made headlines, the explosion happened in an area called "Karada", orchestrated by ISIS but it was mafia hired children who smuggled some explosives in, whether directly or by riding next to the bombed cars as they went in (Those are unofficial information, but my cousin who was part of the investigating told me) leading to the death and injury of over 400 people including some of the participated children.

A generation of those kids have already grown and almost all have moved up the ranks in those mafias or moved on to terrorism. according to one child that we found his brother has joined ISIS. Helping those children while priority is still hard to do, we often find ourselves having to deal with armed men threatening our children, and with the lack of support from the government we don't have the protection needed to function, in our early days in the charity we had to give a child back to the mafia as they threatened to kidnap him and kill the rest, and now we live with the guilt knowing pretty well that whatever happens to that kid or whatever actions he commits is on our hands.