THE NEW HUMANITARIAN (14/6/2022)
Adam Jawad escaped Iraq with his family following the US-led invasion in 2003, living in Syria until war forced him to flee again a decade later, this time to Jordan, where he eked out a living doing odd jobs and working at a cultural centre in the capital, Amman.
Jawad wrote scripts for short movies and sometimes performed as a DJ and rapper, but he felt his aspirations were impossible to realise and saw no future for himself in Jordan. Without the freedom to travel outside the country, and unable to find the support he needed to cope with trauma and displacement, despair took over.
“Amman is a prison,” he wrote in his last post on social media, a few hours before he ripped out the pages from his Iraqi passport and took his own life last November. He was just 27.
A rising number of people in Jordan are choosing to end their lives. The government’s National Institute for Forensic Medicine registered 169 suicides in 2020 – the highest number in a decade (and the latest year for which official statistics are available) – but experts believe the real numbers are probably much higher, since deaths by suicide are often underreported due to the stigma of discussing the issue (…)