The New Zealand Herald and World Vision have launched The Forgotten Millions campaign to raise funds to meet an immense and urgent humanitarian need. With your help we can make a difference for the children and their families in desperate need throughout this region
We need you to help The Forgotten Millions. The Herald and World Vision are running a major campaign to raise funds and help the millions of children left homeless by war in Syria. With your help we can make a difference to the children and their families in desperate need throughout this region
Near the Iraq-Kurdistan border with Turkey, we stop at an aid distribution centre in the village of Derabun.
Iraqis who have fled Isis have come here to register as refugees. They need food, water, shelter, bedding and clothes.
Kne is living here with seven children. She has a son, fivedaughters and her 12-year-old niece, Salvo. They are among two million Iraqis displaced by Isis as it took control of large swathes of central and northern Iraq.
Kne tells me she had six daughters, but when an Isis convoy arrived in her village she "lost" her 5-year-old daughter, Kaje.
"Lost?" I ask.
"They took her," she says. "I have lost a daughter, but I have gained a daughter in Salvo."
Salvo is her late sister's daughter. Kne's sister was killed in Mosul in 2007 when al-Qaeda detonated a truck bomb in a market. Salvo was orphaned last year when Isis forced her father from his car and shot him.
"They told him to get out of the car because he was like a brother to them. Then they shot him," Kne says.
Rachel Smalley with Kne and Salvo. Photo / World Vision
Salvo says she can't talk about her parents. "It is too painful," she says.
Later, Kne tells me that Salvo is ashamed of her situation and embarrassed to be an orphan.
"She is a good girl, she helps me a lot with the other children. I will do whatever I can for her. I owe it to my sister."
Kne rents a room in a clay house in Derabun and shares it with all seven children.
Kovan, who is sitting next to me translating our conversation, continues to talk to her. "She says Isis has her 4-year-old nephew too." Kne makes a crossing gesture on her stomach and then her conversation becomes very animated.
"What is she saying?" I ask.
"Organs," he says.
"She says they are taking the children to sell their organs. There is a market in Mosul apparently. Foreign doctors are removing organs in a hospital there."
Kne says the recipients are foreigners and wealthy Arabs from the Gulf States.
I ask her how she knows this. She says some people have escaped Isis and have spoken of the conversations they heard.
"They can sell an organ for US$5,000 or more," she says.
Last month, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations, Mohamed Alhakim, claimed Isis had entered into a barbaric trade in human organs. He said bodies with surgical incisions and missing organs had been found in mass graves near Mosul.
The claims are yet to be substantiated, but Alhakim is urging the UN Security Council to investigate.
