Our Bridge is a non-political and non-religious humanitarian aid organisation fighting for the shelter, guardianship and school education of orphans, semi-orphans and children with disabilities in the crisis regions of Northern Iraq.
The organisation is born out of the genocide of the Yazidis in August 2014. In the shadow of the night the murderers of the self-proclaimed Islamic State attacked the region Shingal in Northern Iraq. It’s home to the Yazidis, a religious minority, threatened in their very existence for centuries by Islamists. A rain of blood. The fathers and sons of the Yazidis were led onto market places and open fields and were murdered from behind. The mothers and daughters were abducted and forced on trucks going far into country, where enslavement awaited them. The black storm leaves behind a generation of traumatised orphans with no home, no guardian and no future.
In the ten-thousands were the Yazidi refugees reaching the safeguarded area on the shore of Mosul Lake in the weeks following the first day of the genocide. In UN refugee camps like Scharia, Xhanke and Zakho or left ruins and self-build tents the battered families settled to treat their hurt and their ill and wait for their missing family members to return. They were all coming from the mountains of Sindjar, where they had been hiding for days from the murderers of the Islamic State, but left without food or water were helplessly exposed to the unbearable 40 degree heat. Many of their family members died in their arms of hunger or thirst. In the eyes of the children had mirrored an image of suffering that no heart of a child overcomes unscathed.
The conditions and structures in the refugee camps benefited the strong and deserted the weak. Widows with young children and infants were left helplessly alone. Soon the capacities of the UN-camps were exhausted and the families, who didn’t make it in time, forced to find shelter outside in in-official camps. Their most enduring enemy weren’t black-hooded religion fighters anymore, but the merciless climate of the desert. On the unbearable heat of summer days followed a winter with ice-cold winds. Dehydration, circulation collapse, cold and lung infection demanded more fatalities.
Born out of the distress of these children, Our Bridge is founded a few weeks after the genocide by a German-Kurdish students in Oldenburg. They intend to pull up a bridge to reach the children in time with the live-saving aid and to shine a light in their darkness.