The family building a refugee haven in the shadow of Isis

The next morning, the city of Mosul, a bare 150km away, fell to Isis, whose fighters swept east on a seemingly inexorable wave of military successes.

Buxton sat nervously with his family as the news of the extremist victory scudded through their new town.

Eighteen months on, Isis remains in Mosul. But the extremist gains of the summer of 2014 have receded, its military capability diminished since that terrifying zenith.

And Buxton, too, is still in Soran, with his family alongside him.

In the seasons since those fraught beginnings he has built six micro-camps for refugees displaced by jihadi violence, fled over the Turkish border in the middle of the night, engineered the rescue of kidnapped Yazidi girls from Isis and, on rare days off, played with his children in abandoned Iraqi ski fields.

In Australia for the summer, Buxton’s children – aged five, three and one – are anxious to return: “When are we going back to Iraq?” they ask.

They call it home now.

A city of refuge overwhelmed

Soran is an easy place to overlook.

For years, as sectarian violence roiled and raged across southern Iraq, the autonomous region of Kurdistan in the north was held up as the exemplar for the benighted country, a place where peace had brought stability and a measure of development.

Geography, too, has made Soran a haven. The city sits nestled in the foothills of the Zagros mountains, 30km from the border with Iran and 40km from Turkish territory.

For generations, it has been a sanctuary for those fleeing persecution on all sides: those escaping the Iranian regime, the caprice of Saddam Hussein’s brutality or crackdowns on minorities by Turkish authorities all found safety in Soran. More recently Yazidis, Turkomans and Chaldean Christians driven out by the march of Isis have arrived.

“It has been a city of refuge for decades,” Buxton says, and historically ecumenical in a part of the world long divided by sectarianism. Soran is also known as Diana, the Kurdish word for Christian after the Assyrian Christians who historically lived there.

But the latest unrest has distended Soran far beyond its capacity to cope.

“In the late 80s, there were 15,000 people in this town; now there’s 150,000 people. There’s been this exponential growth, of people coming from everywhere; Kurds, Yazidis, Shabak Muslims, people seeking somewhere where they can be safe.”

Buxton, originally from the Sunshine Coast, first visited Soran as part of outreach work for New York’s Times Square church in 2010

Buxton wears his Christianity prominently, but lightly. His conversation is scattered with references to Mother Teresa, William Wilberforce and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

He works for the Colorado-based World Orphans, a Christian charity for children, but his outreach is not limited to the persecuted Christians of the region. In his camps live Kurdish Shia Muslims alongside Yazidis and Zoroastrians among the multitude of religious shades that populate the Middle East.

“We are here for people. There’s no animosity towards someone of another faith. We recognise that people just want the best for their families and their children and their communities.”

In between stints working in Zambia, Colombia and Gaza, Buxton says, he found himself returning to Soran, because, he says, he found “just so much need”.

But it was three years – and another baby – after his first visit before the family felt ready to move to Iraq full-time. With friends and extended family, it required a puncturing of the simplistic “Iraq is dangerous” belief.

“The first thing we did was sit down and talk with our families and explain the work we wanted to do, and that we would be safe. There’s nothing else I love more than my wife and children. I would never recklessly put them in harm’s way. We feel safe in Soran.”

Sarah Buxton, an American citizen who previously worked caring for orphans in South Africa, was initially reluctant about moving to the conflict-torn Middle East.

“All the outside world knows of Iraq is war, that’s all the media talks about,” she says. “But when you go there and see the place, and meet the people, who are welcoming and sincere and peaceful, all of those stereotypes come crashing down.

“Once we got to Soran, there was no way we were turning around. I was not afraid any more, I didn’t feel I was endangering my family in any way, I felt at peace.”

But two months after the Buxtons arrived in Soran, the fragility of that peace was exposed. As they sought to establish a community centre in the middle of the town, Isis continued its brutal march east.

On 7 August Isis fighters captured the strategically vital Mosul dam, the largest in Iraq, which supplies water and electricity to much of the country. The rumour followed that the jihadis were pressing upon Irbil.

This was the trigger. World Orphans told the Buxtons they should leave.

“We’ve only felt afraid once, and that was when we had to leave and the airports were being shut down and our flights were cancelled. That sets in a fear, ‘We’ve got to leave and we can’t’,” Tim Buxton says.

“We got in a taxi in the middle of summer at 12 at night and drove to the Turkish border that had been closed to Iraqi citizens, not knowing if it would be open to us. The whole experience of an evacuation was ultimately positive, we now know there are other ways we can get out, but that was a difficult time.”

‘We had no idea what we were doing’

The Isis gains proved short-lived. They held the dam only 12 days, the beginning of a series of reversals that restored calm to the towns in the mountains.

On 1 September, the Buxtons returned to Soran. Their plan was to establish and run a community centre but, at the first meeting with Soran’s mayor, he told them of a group of 20 Shabak Shia Muslims who had been squatting in an unfinished building and were about to get evicted.

“They had no place else to go,” Buxton says. “And so we used the land we had to make a mini-camp for these people.”

The United Nations doesn’t work in Soran but the city had a cache of UN-donated tents, which was a start. Piece by piece, a camp was born, and from it a new program, the Refuge Initiative.

Buxton remembers the first days, the missteps and the piecemeal progress – “we had no idea what we were doing” – but beyond the bare mechanics of a camp for people to live in, Buxton, his family and his colleagues gradually developed a new philosophy for housing the displaced: “Communities, not camps.”

“These groups of families that had fled together, we wanted to keep together, to preserve the social structures they had, where the leaders of the families run the community and keep order.

“We didn’t go there to provide a new model of a refugee camp, but it’s kind of landed in our laps. Sometimes we think we still have no idea what we’re doing, but we are learning all the time, what works, what doesn’t, and we’re just trying to make things better every day.”

Soran’s needs kept growing. One camp became three. The original settlement was moved to a better site on the outskirts of town and another two came into being.

Numbers often dictate a refugee housing response. The mega-camps of Za’atari in Jordan and Jalozai in Pakistan are not massive by choice but because of the sheer weight of numbers needing shelter. But Buxton’s experience has been that, where possible, smaller, more autonomous camps work better.

“You hear about the ‘150 rule’ in organisations, that things get much harder to manage once you get beyond about 150 people. We’ve found, for us, it’s 20 to 25 families. The one camp we had that was bigger, up to 42 families, there were more problems there. In the smaller camps, there is greater autonomy, greater cooperation.”

But Soran’s Refuge Initiative is, too, part of a broader global trend, of individual enterprise filling the space where governments or supra-national bodies are unable, or unwilling, to help.

It manifests itself in large ways and small: in Austrians walking to their country’s border to welcome refugees across; in Chris Catrambone establishing MOAS to rescue thousands of refugees from the Mediterranean Sea; and in these tight knots of new homes being built in Soran.

The camps have not been, and are not, perfect. There have been setbacks. When winter came, the tents failed.

“It’s not a beautiful fairy story. Things happen that aren’t good. We realised pretty soon the tents couldn’t withstand the conditions. That was a real low point, people were living in tents that kept collapsing in the severe storms in the mountains and we would have to go and see them in the morning, after they’d had these harrowing nights, and we didn’t know what we could do to help them.”

“We didn’t have an endless bucket of money, sometimes we didn’t have two dollars to rub together.”

But over weeks and months the Buxtons fashioned a response, raising money from donations for a “tent-to-homes campaign”. With practice they have the cost down to $5,000 to build a family a complete concrete home, replete with a living room, swamp cooler and kerosene heater – “for the extreme weather conditions” – sandwich board roofing for insulation, septic tank, electricity hook-up, water tank, kitchen and bathroom.

“It’s all built by local guys. We have a contractor who hires the local tradesmen, a whole system running now.”

Rising expectations

Buxton says those involved with the Refuge Initiative are conscious that many of the people under their care come to Soran deeply traumatised. Dozens of the Yazidi families arrive having had men killed and women kidnapped by Isis.

Buxton tells the story of one man who had both of his daughters abducted by Isis. The terrorist group had phoned him demanding a ransom for their return and promising to kill them if it wasn’t paid. It was money that he did not have, that no one in Soran had. Buxton blogged about it, and his post was read by a Kurdistan regional government official who worked in rescuing women kidnapped by extremists.

The girls were saved and the family has since been resettled in Germany.

“That story had a happy ending, but I’m hearing these stories every day and they don’t always end well. These people have suffered a lot, and for a long time.”Sarah Buxton says the trauma of being displaced from home is compounded for female refugees – they suffer for the simple fact of being a woman. While the men go to the bazaar or seek work, the women rarely leave the camps. Their traditional domain – the home – has been taken from them by the upheaval of fleeing.

“So for me, as another woman, to go the communities and to sit with the women – I don’t speak much Kurdish, and they don’t speak much English, but we try to talk a little – to sit and talk and share tea is important,” she says. “It’s important for them to know there is someone caring for them, someone looking out for them.”

Most of the children arrive in Soran having had little or no schooling. “We realised once people had shelter, we needed to get the kids out of the camps.”

The Refuge Initiative’s community centre has become their classroom. Lessons are conducted in the afternoon and what started as three days a week of recreational learning has burgeoned into five days of classes for 130 children aged from three to 18. Five local teachers – Muslims and Christians – are employed as teachers.

But as the Refuge Initiative program grows, so too has expectation. “Because were are the only NGO in town, people are looking to us to do everything. They know the organisation is American, so they think I have Obama’s phone number, or that we have endless supplies of money, when the reality is we have to – for want of a better term – crowdfund for every single thing we want to do.”

Buxton says he doesn’t know how long he will remain in Iraq, saying only that he and his family will stay as long as he can, and as long as they can help.

He chafes good-naturedly at the term “missionary”, though more at its pejorative use. His work, he says, does not involve proselytising.

But he recognises the world can be a hostile place for Christians – the kidnapping of an elderly Australian doctor and his wife in Burkina Faso last month was a salient example of the unpredictability of conflict-torn parts of the world.

And reminders of the conflict all around the Buxton’s mountain sanctuary are never far away. The source of the danger is not always the expected.

Bombing by Turkish warplanes of suspected PKK positions in the Qandil mountains – barely 40km away – have shaken the houses in Soran this year.

Buxton says he and his family is cognisant of shifting sands of the conflict around, but committed to doing what they can, for as long as they can.

“We’re in this as a family,” he says. “For us, we want to make an impact, so as long as we’re able to make a difference to people’s lives we’re in. It still excites us.”

The Buxton children – Elliana, Charlie, and Lily – love their “home” in Iraq, their parents say.

“Home is where the family is,” Sarah says. “The kids have adapted amazingly well. They have each other and we just try to love each other as a family. But the kids are also loved by all the people in Soran. They’ve tried to learn the language and to learn about their new place. I know that they feel safe and secure where they are, we’ve made it a home.”

Tim says his eldest daughter, Elliana, has embraced the local people and culture, and has begun to learn some Kurdish. “She’s very outgoing, she can say hello and goodbye in Kurdish, and she can count.”

“And my son asked me the other day, ‘When are we going home to Iraq?’ It’s home for them. They don’t fear – as adults we can project fear on to our kids, but we haven’t had any need to.”