Iraqi refugees flood fragile region

AMMAN, Jordan – The dazzling speed with which Muhanned al-Naib’s life unraveled still leaves him reeling. One minute, it seems, he was welcoming the U.S. advance on Baghdad, embracing the opportunity to meet and work with Americans, spending his fat new salary on the electronic gadgetry suddenly available in Baghdad’s markets and jamming guitar with U.S. soldiers who shared his taste in rock music.

And then suddenly it all was gone. He received threats because he worked for a U.S. company. He fled to Jordan, but last summer the Jordanian authorities refused to renew his visa. For the past eight months, he has lived in the shadows, hardly daring to leave his apartment for fear of being deported by Jordanian police, too afraid to return to Iraq for fear of being killed.

He has become, according to the U.N.’s definition, a refugee – except that no country will give him sanctuary.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I had such big hopes for Iraq after the Americans came and now I don’t even have a home,” said al-Naib, a 34-year-old single man who is among the estimated 2.4 million Iraqis living beyond Iraq’s borders in what now amounts to the biggest refugee crisis in the world, one that has crept up by stealth.

These refugees don’t live in tents or sleep out in the open. They didn’t swarm across the border in a dramatic, headline-grabbing exodus. Few noticed that many of the planes leaving Iraq over the past year were fully booked for weeks ahead, while those that returned came back almost empty, or that the queues of traffic waiting at Iraq’s border crossings were always longer than those heading the other way.

Yet one by one, family by family, Iraqis have steadily been draining out of their country, driven by violence, fear or threats, to the point where nearly one in 10 Iraqis is now living outside Iraq, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

The total of 2.4 million refugees includes some who left Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, but it is during the ensuing four years of war that Iraq has experienced a huge exodus.

The vast majority of Iraqi refugees – around 2 million – have fled to Syria and Jordan, where they are straining the already overstretched infrastructures of two of the region’s poorer countries, pushing up rents and prices, drawing scarce water resources and crowding public health facilities and schools.

‘Slow to wake up’

In terms of numbers, it’s bigger than the crisis in Darfur, according to the UNHCR. It’s also the largest mass migration in the region since the exodus of Palestinians from Israel in 1948 – and it risks becoming every bit as destabilizing as that still-unresolved issue.

Yet only now is the outside world waking up to the enormity of this latest unforeseen side effect of the Iraq war, and it is showing little inclination to help.

“This huge humanitarian crisis has been developing without anyone really realizing it. The world has been extremely slow to wake up,” said Astrid van Genderen Stort, UNHCR’s spokeswoman for the Middle East.

The U.S. is one of the biggest culprits, refugee advocates say. After being widely criticized for admitting only 202 Iraqis in 2006 and only 466 since the war began, the Bush administration increased the quota for Iraqis to 7,000 for this year. Last month, the State Department said that number could potentially be increased to 25,000.

But six months into the fiscal year, which began in September, the State Department has so far admitted only 68 Iraqis – suggesting it is still a long way from meeting even the lower of its targets.

That is a source of particular bitterness for Iraqis such as al-Naib, whose enthusiastic embrace of America’s war effort put his life in danger and now leaves him with no place to go. He proudly keeps the “employee of the month” certificate he was awarded in April 2004 by the KBR subsidiary he worked for in Baghdad, though he didn’t keep the typewritten threat he says he received accusing him of being “an American agent” and telling him to “say his last prayers.”

“I feel let down by the Americans. I feel I need some kind of compensation, not just because I worked for them but because of what they did to me and my country,” al-Naib said. “They should give me some kind of asylum.”

U.S. officials say resettling large numbers of Iraqis isn’t the solution. Rather, they say, the goal of U.S. policy, including President Bush’s troop increase in support of the Baghdad security plan, is to pacify Iraq so that the refugees can go home.

“Creating the conditions, the stability, the peace for people to be able to go home has got to be the main solution for most of the people who are currently displaced,” Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration, told reporters at a UNHCR conference on the issue in Geneva last month.

Human rights groups, however, blame politics for America’s reluctance to recognize there was a problem until recently.

“For the U.S. to acknowledge the refugee problem would have been to admit failure,” said Bill Frelick, director of refugee policy at the New York-based Human Rights Watch. “The first wave of refugees were those on whom the U.S. hoped to build a new Iraqi society. They were Western-oriented, they spoke English, and to recognize that these very people are the ones who are being forced to flee amounts to an admission of failure.”

Carrying the load

Other countries are hardly proving more generous. Though some, such as Sweden, have allowed thousands of Iraqis to claim political asylum, the European Union said last month it sees no need to admit more Iraqi refugees. And the gulf Arab states have such rigid visa procedures it is almost impossible for Iraqis to travel there. Egypt, host to 100,000 displaced Iraqis, has announced that it has stopped issuing visas to Iraqis.

That leaves Syria and Jordan shouldering the burden of hosting the majority of fleeing Iraqis, and they are starting to chafe.

With 1.2 million Iraqis living on its soil, Syria has kept its doors open, and most of the estimated 10,000 Iraqis fleeing the violence every month are heading there.

Jordan, however, is starting to clamp down, amid concerns about the impact that the presence of 750,000 Iraqis will have on the fragile political and demographic balance in this nation of 6 million, 40 percent to 60 percent of whom are Palestinian refugees or their descendants.

Since late last year, the Jordanian authorities have been turning back Iraqis at the airport and the border, and they have stopped renewing the temporary visas of the Iraqis already there. They also have refused to grant formal refugee status to Iraqis – as has Syria – forcing many to go underground.