http://911review.org/Reports/Iraq_refugee.html
NOTE :
Previous articles i have read, show that many that lived in Iraq that
had the money to leave,
already have. Most saying they will only return when the security
situation is better,
many will not return. (what would it take for YOU to live there ?)
Among the people who are there, are the opportunists.
People who think they can get money from Government contracts,
or those escaping prosecution from another country
This is very similar to New Orleans (where i live)
Many have planted roots elsewhere, and do not plan to return any time
soon.
With reports of close to 1 million dead in Iraq,
the term that this war was simply "mismanaged",is the understatement
of the decade.
The monetary cost of this was is staggering as well.
SYria, Lebanon and other areas are taking up the refugees at a very
high price, and they HATE the US for it.
Brad
http://911review.org
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The Flight From Iraq
By Nir Rosen
The New York Times
Sunday 13 May 2007
I. Roads to Damascus
At a meeting in mid-April in Geneva, held by Ant=F3nio Guterres, the
United Nations high commissioner for refugees, the numbers presented
confirmed what had long been suspected: the collapse of Iraq had
created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to
precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything
that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the
establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be
1=2E2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan,
100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in
Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled
Iraq was put at two million by Guterres. The number of displaced
Iraqis still inside Iraq's borders was given as 1.9 million. This
would mean about 15 percent of Iraqis have left their homes.
Most of this movement has occurred in the last two years. An
outflow began after the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. But since the
upsurge of violence following the bombing of a Shiite holy site in
Samarra 14 months ago, the flight has been large and constant. It now
reaches a rate of up to 50,000 people per month.
Many of Iraq's neighbors initially welcomed the refugees. These
countries were motivated by self-interest as well as by generosity.
Certain political refugees, like Baathist officials, who were among
the first to leave Iraq, had a political use in negotiations with the
American-led occupation and the Iraqi government that succeeded it.
And the well-to-do early refugees - those who could meet Jordan's
requirement of $100,000 in the bank to qualify for a residency permit,
for example - brought much-needed capital. But the numbers and the
welcome became unsustainable: Jordan and Egypt have made it very
difficult for Iraqis to enter, and even Syria, with a long history of
welcoming refugees, has passed regulations, like restrictions on the
purchase of property and on access to free health care, that are
intended to ensure that Iraqi refugees are only temporary residents.
Iraq's neighbors take the position that Iraqi refugees are not in fact
refugees at all, because refugee status enables refugees to make
claims on the host country. Iraq's government has itself taken roughly
the same position, because it cannot afford to acquiesce in the loss
of its population or acknowledge its own failure to provide security.
The United States and Great Britain, as the principal authors of the
current war, have been urged by rights activists to shoulder
responsibility for the war's refugees - a responsibility they have so
far evaded. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees, the principal international body for refugee issues,
succeeded in finding new homes for just 404 refugees in the first nine
months of 2006 and says it hopes to resettle 20,000 by the end of
2007. That would be 1 percent of the current total. The agency's fund-
raising mark for 2007 is $60 million - for humanitarian relief rather
than resettlement - of which it has so far raised only half. As with
the war itself, the situation of the war's refugees is at once dire
and full of dangers for the region and the world - and no one seems to
know how to resolve it.
From the Iraqi perspective, the greatest loss has been the flight
of the professional class, the people whose resources and skills might
once have combined to build a post-Saddam Iraq. It seems, however,
that precisely because they are critical to rebuilding Iraq and less
prone to sectarianism and violence, professionals are most vulnerable
to those forces that are tearing Iraq apart. Many of them are now in
Syria. An hour's drive from Damascus, in Qudsiya, there has grown up
an Iraqi neighborhood complete with a Baghdad Barbershop and an Iraq
Travel Agency. Off one alley, in January, I entered a hastily
constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, the concrete and
cinder blocks slapped together. The carved wooden doors to each
apartment were in stark contrast to the grim, unpainted hallways.
Inside one such apartment lived a doctor named Lujai - she refused to
give her family name - and her five children. Omar, at 15, was the
oldest; the youngest was just 2. A family-medicine specialist, Lujai
arrived in Qudsiya last September from Baghdad, where she had her own
clinic and her husband, Adil, was a thoracic surgeon and a professor
at the medical college. They were the same age and from the same town
(Ana, in Anbar Province), and they had been married for 15 years when
Adil was murdered.
Right after the invasion of Iraq, Lujai told me, Shiite clerics
took over many of Baghdad's hospitals but did not know how to manage
them. "They were sectarian from the beginning," she said, "firing
Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the problems started. They
wanted to separate Sunnis. The Ministry of Health was given to the
Sadr movement" - that is, to the Shiite faction loyal to Moktada al-
Sadr. Following the 2005 elections that brought Islamist Shiites to
power, Lujai said, the Sadrists initiated what they called a "campaign
to remove the Saddamists." The minister of health and his turbaned
advisers saw to it that in hospitals and health centers the walls were
covered with posters of Shiite clerics like Sadr, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani and Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. Shiite religious songs could often
be heard in the halls. In June of last year, Ali al-Mahdawi, a Sunni
who had managed the Diyala Province's health department, disappeared,
along with his bodyguards, at the ministry of health. (In February,
the American military raided the ministry and arrested the deputy
health minister, saying he was tied to the murder of Mahdawi.) Lujai
told me that Sunni patients were often accused by Sadrist officials of
being terrorists. After the doctors treated them, the special police
from the Ministry of the Interior would arrest the Sunni patients.
Their corpses would later be found in the Baghdad morgue. "This
happened tens of times," she said, to "anybody who came with bullet
wounds and wasn't Shiite."
On Sept. 2, 2006, Lujai's husband went to work and prepared for
the first of three operations scheduled for the day. At the end of his
shift a patient came in unexpectedly; no other doctor was available,
so Adil stayed to treat him. Adil was driving home when his way was
blocked by four cars. Armed men surrounded him and dragged him from
his car, taking him to Sadr City. Five hours later, his dead body was
found on the street.
As she told me this story, Lujai began to cry, and her confused
young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police
to investigate her husband's murder and was told: "He is a doctor, he
has a degree and he is a Sunni, so he couldn't stay in Iraq. That's
why he was killed." Two weeks later she received a letter ordering her
to leave her Palestine Street neighborhood.
On Sept. 24 she and her children fled with her brother Abu Shama,
his wife and their four children. They gave away or sold what they
could and paid $600 for the ride in the S.U.V. that carried them to
Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, as many as
20 other doctors also fled.
http://911review.org/Reports/Iraq_refugee.html
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