ARTICLES: A budding young journalist puts herself in the picture

It was only 10 am when I arrived at Garmawa camp, 35km south-west of the city of Dohuk, but the sun was shining bright and the temperature was already very hot.  As we wiped the sweat off our brows, my colleague explained the camp’s apt name: “In Kurdish, ‘garm’ means hot and ‘awa’ means water.”

Garmawa is a new camp being set up to accommodate up to 10,000 of the approximately 200,000 Internally Displaced Persons, who fled into Dohuk Governorate because of the violence spreading across central and northern Iraq.

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ARTICLES: How Iraq is Using Reality TV and Facebook to Inspire a Generation of Peacemakers

Educational reality TV and social media are the drivers inspiring a group of Iraqi youth demanding a different future — one with peaceful resolutions and equality.

Nareen, an 18-year-old Iraqi whose last name has been withheld for safety reasons, starred in Iraq’s first youth reality TV show called Salam Shabab to compete for the title of becoming an “Ambassador of Peace” last year. Salam Shabab is a competitive TV show with the ultimate goal of uniting Iraq through peace building.

The first step to peace building is getting Iraqis from different races, religions and geographical backgrounds to respect and understand each other and work together. Iraqis have immense local pride, but do not have a strong sense of nationalism. This could be due to the fact Iraq’s regions are divided and traveling to different provinces is limited. Most youth have not interacted with people from different regions or left their hometowns.

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