Oct. 14--For weeks, the refugee crisis in Europe has dominated headlines with stories of desperate Syrian migrants making epic journeys through Turkey, across the Aegean Sea and then on through Greece Eastern Europe.
But Europe isn't the only place contending with waves of people displaced by war. The slow advance of Islamic State militants in Iraq's western flank has had the effect of pushing thousands of people -- Christians, Yazidis and Muslims who don't share the caliphate's absolutist world view -- into the relatively protected area of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Since January of 2014, in fact, roughly 3.2 million people have been internally displaced in Iraq -- left to inhabit crowded accommodations with relatives, ramshackle spaces provided by charitable souls or bare-bones tents in crowded refugee camps outside of Erbil and Duhok, among other locations.
For months, Metrography, the first and only independent photo agency in Iraq, has been chronicling the daily lives of Iraq's internally displaced. The fledgling agency, as I first reported in May, works with locally based photographers -- many of whom are Iraqi and have been refugees themselves -- to report stories in the region. In the spring, the agency held a successful crowd-funding campaign to finance a wave of new assignments related to the refugee crisis.
This week, Metrography has begun publishing some of those stories. Titled "A Map of Displacement," the series explores the ways in which the upheaval has affected the lives of those that have been caught in the crossfire.
There is the photo essay about a pair of Christian and Sunni families who share a home at a time of high sectarian violence. There are the elegant portraits of refugee camp families -- along with images of some of their most prized possessions. There is the story about the pair of Yazidi teenagers working at an oil refinery on the outskirts of Sulaimaniyah, hopeful they might raise enough cash to smuggle their family to Germany.
"We feel very proud to finally be able to see the hard work we have done over the past year come together," Metrography editor-in-chief Stefano Carini stated via e-mail from Sulaimaniyah, where the agency is based. "It is very exciting to see the results of a whole year of work, and we hope that people will take their time to navigate through the stories."
The project is no small achievement. Reporting on a refugee crises can often be a story of numbers. Millions displaced internally. Millions making the perilous journey to Europe. Millions who still suffer under the brutality of Islamic State. These powerful photo essays help tell the story of the everyday caught in those headlines, trying to make do with whatever they have.
See more images and stories by the photographers at Metrography at "Map of Displacement."
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