A precarious living for children in Iraq | Aljazeera 

  
Many young Syrian refugees and Iraqi IDPs lack access to education, and end up working for a few dollars a day.
Erbil, Iraq – In the 36-degree noontime heat, 12-year-old Mohammad Fadae, a refugee child from the Syrian city of Qamishli, prepared to leave for his job at an auto shop outside the Kawergosk refugee camp in Iraq’s Erbil governorate.
“I make 12,000 dinars [$10] a day. I want to make more, but it’s a war out there,” he told Al Jazeera. “There are so many children like me working; it’s cut-throat competition.”
Fadae, who has lived at Kawergosk for more than two years, has tried many other jobs since his family fled from Syria to Iraq. To make ends meet, he has sold gum at traffic signals in Erbil, washed cars, worked at farms in villages near the camp and run a business smuggling aid items to refugees in his camp. He stopped the business after camp authorities threatened him with jail.
Inside Kawergosk, many children run around in tattered clothes, struggling to carry large water canisters or doing other chores for their families. 
According to aid agencies UNICEF and Save the Children, only 45 percent of the children are enrolled in schools in refugee or internally displaced persons (IDP) camps. Outside of camps, in the host communities where many refugees and IDPs are living, the situation is worse, with just 30 percent of children having access to educational facilities.
Meanwhile, more than 1,000 school buildings across Iraq’s Kurdish region are being used as shelters for nearly 50,000 Iraqi displaced persons. Seventy-six percent of Iraq’s internally displaced children have also missed a year of schooling, according to UNICEF and Save the Children.
Fadae speaks Arabic, Kurdish, and broken English, which he learned at a UNICEF school in the refugee camp before he dropped out to work. 
“I enjoyed school, but I also have to take care of my family, you know. I can do one thing at a time,” he said. Most of his friends have also left school to work. Traffic signals in Erbil are crowded with children selling small toys, combs and balloons for a small amount of money.
In addition to children dropping out of school to find work, teachers have also abandoned classrooms in favour of paid work.

“We have not been paid for seven months,” said Mohammad Nafee, who taught at a school in Qamishli before fleeing to Iraq. He now teaches at a school in the Kawergosk camp, but with two school-age daughters himself, he is looking for another job to secure their future.