EP#12 | Meet Becky Bakr Abdulla from the NRC

In this episode you will meet Becky Bakr Abdulla, Media Coordinator in Iraq at the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). Listening to this episode will really give you an understanding of the importance of communications and what it means to be working in a conflict situation for an international organization such as the NRC. Becky Bakr Abdulla, a 27-year old from Oslo, Norway, is in the beginning of her career with the Norwegian Refugee Council, the NRC. In a short while she has gone from graduating university, via an internship, to being sent right into a field role as a Media Coordinator, where she’s dealing directly with the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. Becky is also a child of refugee parents from Kurdistan, which is located in the northern part of Iraq, where she is currently based. – Obviously that sort of background has always given me an interest in more than just in a region border. I’ve always had an interest in travelling, in learning more about other cultures and other nationalities. So when it was time for me to study and decide on something to study, I started off in Rome, in Italy, and I did some courses there in philosophy. And then, I did some courses in sociology before I decided that media communication sounded very interesting. So that’s my background. It’s within media and communication, and it’s given me a nice platform for the work I’m doing now with NRC, where I’m the Media Coordinator. And I’m also based abroad. So I find myself in a very satisfying position, Becky says. Working with the humanitarian crisis in Iraq Becky is stationed in Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdistan region in the northern part of Iraq where the majority of the population are Kurds. With 3.4 million people currently displaced inside their own country and, in addition, the Kurdistan region of Iraq have taken in approximately 250,000 Syrians. This means that Iraq is in an ongoing crisis currently now, escalating into becoming a humanitarian crisis on a very big level. – We see that there’s a lot of attention on Syria, rightly so, but Iraq is definitely forgotten when it comes to the human stories, the human testimonies, the human suffering that we so desperately need more to focus on. And that’s also been extremely rewarding and something I’m very proud of myself and my team down here is that we’ve now managed with Fallujah to show the rest of the world through BBC, through Al Jazeera, through CNN, through New York Times, through dozens of different media outlets, that these are the people of Iraq, these are the civilian and innocent women, children, elderly that are taking the biggest fall for what’s going on here. And that’s been extremely rewarding, Becky says. With her job also comes a lot of traveling. So for the last month, she has been based in Baghdad, covering the Fallujah crisis and response. But she also travel to other parts of the country, to a city called Kirkuk and also to Dohuk, which is a city in the northern part of Kurdistan where most of the Syrian refugees are currently located. According to Becky the Iraq crisis is a forgotten crisis in the sense that Iraq is all over the news almost on a daily basis, but the focus tends to be with the military and the political narrative. Read the whole article about Becky here: https://unjobfinder.org/podcasts/making-the-world-know-what-is-going-on---becky-bakr-abdulla-at-the-nrc