Iraq's Lost Generation

Channel 4 : Broadcast: Sunday 16 March 2008 07:00 PM

In the past five years more than four million Iraqis - 20 per cent of the entire population - have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed.

In the past five years more than four million Iraqis - 20 per cent of the entire population - have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed. Two million have become exiles, living desperate lives across the border in Syria and Jordan. This edition of Dispatches investigates the biggest and most catastrophic refugee crisis in the Middle East since the Palestinian diaspora of 1948.

Iraq's Lost Generation is the first film in the Happy Birthday Iraq season marking the fifth anniversary of the invasion - a series of penetrating programmes examining the devastating fall-out of the war for Iraq and the Middle East, America and Britain.

Award-winning journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy travels to Syria and Jordan to investigate the plight of Iraqi refugees. These are the very people on whom the new, democratic Iraq was to be built - the professional middle classes - nearly half of whom now live as desperate refugees, driven out by the violence and civil breakdown.

Continued . . .