Angelina Jolie Spreads Air of Warmth, visits Families in Iraqi Camp as 33,000 Refugees Flee Syria

You have seen her beauty and you’ve been moved in awe by her style. You have seen some of the fantastic movies starring her and you’ve also seen her travel around the world- whether it’s the land of the Giant Panda in China or Egypt’s river Nile.

There are few people who manage to occupy the headlines even whilst they are away from mainstream movie action as Angelina Jolie. While there’s hardly a doubt about her acting graph- checkered with hits like Mr and Mrs Smith, Girl Interrupted, A Mighty Heart among many others- there was this growing concern as to where had Angelina Jolie been all this while.

It appears that the mystery has now been sorted. It wasn’t that Angelina Jolie had been elsewhere or simply avoiding the plush Hollywood fanfare that’s so often rested with her- she was simply engaged in her humanitarian work, that often sees the Hollywood actor spending several days together in Africa.

Recently, it became known that Angelina Jolie was actually in the tectonic and blazing land of the Middle East where she was engaged in some important work and has, duly returned to the spotlight. Given the feisty and events of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East- not that, the part of the world is away from controversies and constant geopolitical events- Angelina Jolie, it appears, was concerned about the fate of hundreds and thousands of the Iraqi refugees that had been fleeing the Syrian war in Iraq.

She’s been in the most cataclysmic part of the Middle East, where the Hollywood starlet has spent hours together walking the bombed streets and bylanes of a war-torn Mosul, the centre of disparaging and disturbing activity in the fight against Daesh, or to put it simply- ISIS.

In touring a refugee camp that housed as many as 33,000 refugees together, Angelina Jolie offered a marvellous act of kindness by visiting the aggrieved who were planning to leave the worn out (read ‘war’n out) shores of Syria toward someplace safer. And here was the most heartbreaking and telling confession that Angelina Jolie revealed. Stating that the scenes of bombardment and disruption were so severe here in a war-torn Iraq, according to her, these were the worst-ever sights she came across in her 17-year-old humanitarian career.

“In all my years of working with the UNHCR, these are the worst devastations that I have ever seen.”

That alone suggests the extent of the damage wreaked on the heart of Iraq as also in Syria. The violence, continued for months together has wreaked nearly an irreparable damage on the face of the Middle East, that is crying for change. During her important visit to Iraq where Angelina Jolie met with 33,000 refugees- displaced and with no safe roof under their head- it became known that the actor had visited a camp on as many as three different occasions in the last six years.

Visiting the Domiz camp, was a turning point in Angelina Jolie’s Middle Eastern visit, not by any stretch of the imagination, a sojourn or something of that sort. But what did hurt her was the sheer lack of medical facilities that were on offer for the suffering lot. There was hardly any medical provision at the Domiz camp here at wartorn Iraq, Jolie would share.

No medicine for children, no provision of running water, with disrupted lives and the squalor of children- it could be said- if there’s devastation or hell here on mother pious earth, then it’s out here in the disrupted refugee camps, where Assad still manages to rule, somehow or only just.

She also urged the refugees not to forget about what happened at Mosul, her key address to the displaced and grieving being delivered under the banner, “do not forget Mosul.”

It could be said, what the fallen city of Mosul in Iraq needs on an urgent basis is immediate humanitarian support. What it also needs is UN-led initiatives to cater to an extensive rebuilding exercise that can bring some normality to a place that could urgently need some. The impassioned actor and champion of human rights exclaimed, ‘I hope there will be a continued commitment to rebuilding and stabilising the whole of the city,’ she said. ‘I call on the international community not to forget Mosul.’

But the question is, just what is going to happen to Mosul. For now, even as ISIS has been dethroned in a city it had turned savage with bloodshed, it remains to be seen what might happen in the future if there’s a war-like situation to happen again?