Since the first Gulf War, there have been various waves of refugees and internally displaced persons in Iraq. They now amount to nearly 3.5 million, of which 2.5 million came about in 2014 alone. Iraqi sources estimate that over 4 million people have lost their homes and have become internally displaced, including the unregistered internally displaced. Moreover, since June 2014, thousands of people belonging to minority groups have been murdered, maimed or kidnapped, including an unknown number of women and girls forced into marriage or sexual slavery. These abuses continue and seem to be part of a conscious attempt to eradicate Iraq’s religious and ethnic diversity. These violations are not only being committed by the Jihadists in Daesh.  

Given by: 

Pascale Warda, Iraq’s former Minister of Immigration and Refugees. Including the intervention of Ana Gil, a journalist and author of the book “Una rosa en Irak” (“A Rose in Iraq”). The event will be presented by Karim Hauser, who is responsible for the Governance Area at Casa Árabe.

Pascale Warda was the Minister of Immigration and Refugees in the interim Iraqi government and one of the six women in Iraq’s provisional Cabinet, made up of 32 members, which operated after the handing over of power from the Provisional Coalition Authority to the Provisional Government of Iraq in 2004. During the long years in which Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, Warda, from her exile in France, served as a representative of the Assyrian Democratic Movement (ADM), the main Assyrian political party in Iraq. She later ran the ADM’s office for diplomatic relations in Damascus, where she was also the co-founder of the Iraqi Society for Human Rights.  After she returned to Iraq in 2001, Pascale Warda served for three years as the head of the Union of Assyrian Women, applying her experience in the field of human rights, refugees and civil society to her work with Assyrian women.  At present, she is the manager of external affairs for Assyrian Aid Society, and in Baghdad she recently co-founded the Iraqi Women’s Center for Development.  She has a Master’s degree in Human Rights Studies from the Catholic University in Lyon, France.