born in tents, and our children will be the same. Is this our legacy?”
According to a UN official, Arab governments were reluctant to call the Iraqis refugees because the term is associated with the Palestinians. “The Palestinians are a people without a land,” he said. “Iraqis still have a country, although I think it will break up like the former Yugoslavia. It is not positive to be associated with the Palestinians.” Jordan, with half its population made up of Palestinian refugees, was afraid of a second refugee wave.
No discussion of refugees in the Middle East can begin without addressing the Palestinian experience. Between 1947 and 1949 up to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Palestine by Jewish militias; hundreds of Palestinian villages were wiped off the map. They were dispersed throughout the region, unable to return home and unable to assimilate fully into the countries to which they fled. They soon organized, forming armed groups and trying to return home. These groups were often manipulated by various governments in the region for their own ends, and some even fought one another. Their presence contributed to the destabilization of several countries, while in places like Lebanon, they were preyed upon by more powerful militias, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their cause became a rallying cry. After 2003, radical groups based in the camps exported fighters to Iraq.
In Damascus
The flow of fighters into Iraq, of millions of refugees out of Iraq, the smuggling of weapons and even sheep, and the export of dangerous ideas such as sectarianism and jihadism demonstrated that the Iraqi civil war was close to becoming a regional conflict. One factor militating against such a development was the fact that the Iraqi refugees had not settled in camps but instead had been absorbed into cities like Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, which made it more difficult to organize or mobilize them, though also more difficult to help or monitor them. Like the Palestinians, most Iraqi refugees may never return home. The decimated Christian and Sabean minorities had left for good. Sunnis from Baghdad and the south, now cleansed and controlled by Shiites, were also likely never to return. Although the Palestinian cause and its initial popularity in the Arab world eased their integration into Syria and elsewhere, and they were tolerated and even welcomed with generosity by the local population in some instances, this goodwill did not last forever. In Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and elsewhere, it ran out. Jordan and particularly Syria have shown extreme generosity, but they are both straining under the burden.
Damascus became so full of Iraqis that rent prices soared, driving many refugees as far as Aleppo. One hour away from Damascus, in Qudsiya, I found an Iraqi neighborhood with a “Baghdad Barbershop” and “Iraq Travel Agency.” Off an alley I entered a hastily constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, cement and cinder blocks thrown together without paint. The carved wooden doors to each apartment were a stark contrast to the grim hallways. Inside I found Dr. Lujai and her five children. At fifteen, Omar was the oldest; the youngest was two years old. Dr. Lujai, a family medicine specialist with her own clinic, had lived in Baghdad with her husband, Dr. Adil, a thoracic surgeon and professor at the medical college. Both were forty-three-year-old Sunnis who originally came from Ana, a town in the Anbar province. They had been married for fifteen years.
Right after the war Dr. Lujai began to notice changes. Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad’s hospitals following the postwar looting, and they did not know how to manage a hospital. “They were sectarian from the beginning,” she said, “firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement, and the minister was only a general practitioner.” Following the 2005 elections the Sadrist ministers initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The advisers to the minister of health wore the turbans of clerics and mismanaged the ministry. In hospitals and health centers, walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics. Traditional Shiite music could often be heard in the halls.
Sunni doctors began disappearing. Ali al-Mahdawi, who managed the Diyala province’s health department, was said to have gone into the ministry for a meeting and never came out. Several months later, American military raids uncovered secret prisons run by Ministry officials with hundreds of prisoners. Several days after Mahdawi was released, he was murdered on the street. A pharmacist they knew called Ahmed al-Azzawi went in for a meeting with the minister and was killed by his militia.
Dr. Lujai reported that Sunni patients were accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors completed their operations, she said, the Interior Ministry’s special police would arrest the patients. Their corpses would then be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.” Dr. Lujai knew of five Sunni doctors and two Christians who were threatened to leave or fired.
On September 2, 2006, Abu Omar, as Dr. Adil was known, went to work as he usually did in the morning. He had three patients to operate on that day. A fourth came in unexpectedly after he was done, and since no other doctor was available to treat him, Dr. Adil stayed later than usual. He finished work that day at around two in the afternoon. Their home was about fifteen minutes away, on days when the road was open. At 2:15 Abu Omar 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, and the next day his body was found in the morgue. I tried to find out the way he was killed, but Dr. Lujai was overcome, crying, and her confused young children looked at her silently. She had asked the Iraqi police to investigate her husband’s murder, but an officer told her, “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 printed from a computer ordering her to leave the area.
On September 24, Dr. Lujai fled with her brother Abu Shama, his wife, and his four children. Her sister had already been threatened, and had fled to Qudsiya. They gave away or sold all their belongings and paid six hundred dollars for the GMCs that carried them to Syria. Because of what happened to her husband, she said, up to twenty other doctors fled. Abu Shama was an engineer and professor at the College of Technology. He had lived in Baghdad’s Khadhra district. In June 2006 a letter was placed under the door in his office ordering him to leave Iraq or be killed. He stopped going to work after that. One of his best friends, a Sunni married to a Shiite, had been killed in front of the college.
In Qudsiya they paid five hundred dollars a month in rent for the three-bedroom apartment both families shared. Their children were able to attend local schools for free, but Iraqis were not able to work in Syria, so they depended on relatives and savings for their survival. Twenty-five members of their family fled to Syria. Four days before I visited them they heard that a Sunni doctor they knew had been killed in Baghdad’s Kadhimiya district, where he worked. He had been married to a Shiite woman. “He was a pediatric specialist,” she told me. “We needed him.” The people and government of Syria had been good to them, they agreed, and they did not expect to go back to Iraq. Dr. Lujai did not think Iraq could go back to the way it had been. “It’s a dream to return to our country,” she said.
“First minorities left Iraq, now we get Sunnis targeted by Shiite militias.”
Jordan had already closed its borders to Iraqis, and Iran required a sponsor for Iraqi refugees, though for obvious reasons most would never think of going to Iran. “Syria is the only open gate for refugees,” said Lorens Jolles of the UNHCR in Damascus. “At one point Syrian society won’t be able to accommodate them,” worried a worker from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Syria, with a population of only nineteen million, has a record of extreme generosity to refugees. It houses four hundred thousand Palestinians expelled from their homeland. During Israel’s July 2006 war against Lebanon, Syria took in up to half a million Lebanese refugees.
“For us every Iraqi who is here is a refugee,” said Jolles. “This takes into account the generalized violence and targeting of most groups in Iraq. And everybody is in need of protection.” Because Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan are not signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees, the Iraqis did not have the right to work—although those with sufficient money could open businesses, and others worked illegally. UNHCR had signed memorandums of understanding with those countries requiring refugees to be resettled in a third country within a year after UNHCR had declared them refugees. UNHCR had to establish a category of “persons of concern” without calling them refugees in order to avoid getting dragged into battle with the national authorities. It therefore gave the Iraqis the opportunity to register for temporary protection, a legal trick to recognize them as having fled a situation of
