29 Sep Outfitting Girls Soccer Teams

Our organization recently outfitted three girls soccer teams in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq with new gear for all players and coaches! (And even the little brother of a player who proudly visited his big sister’s practice session!) Two of the teams were for girls living with their families in the refugee system here – both internally displaced people (IDP) and international asylum seekers. 

The third team we supported, pictured here, is a city club team. Our organization member, Sipu, is involved in coaching for all three teams and is herself an aspiring professional soccer player!

You may wonder, what is the difference between an internally displaced person and an asylum seeker in the context of refugee status?

To sum it up best, let us present the United Nations (UN) definition of IDP: “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized border.”

In this current regional context and in our area of operation, an IDP is usually a person who was forced to flee their home when the rise of ISIS terrorism began in summer of 2014. 

Even though ISIS terror has largely been quelled in this region, unfortunately many thousands of families were never able to return home. These are Iraqi citizens, typically ethnically Kurdish and from a religious minority called Yezidi.

A refugee, on the other hand (according to the UN definition) is, “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

In this regional context, refugees from the ongoing civil war and terrorism in Syria, were obliged to cross the border into the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to seek safety. Ethnically a minority in Syria, and with an additional history of oppression by the Syrian regime, hundreds of thousands of Kurdish Syrians have fled to the neighboring Kurdistan Region of Iraq for asylum.

We are proud to do a small part in empowering the next generation of girls in this place and lead by example.