UMM QASR, Iraq, 31 July 2003 — Tears flowed and long-parted relatives embraced yesterday as more than 200 Iraqis set foot in their homeland again after 13 years of exile in neighboring Saudi Arabia. “I feel like my soul has returned to my body,” said Ali Salman, his eyes swimming with tears at the Umm Qasr border crossing in southern Iraq. “I can’t believe I am actually home and that I will see my family again. I just can’t believe it.”

Like most of the 240 men, women and children who were repatriated by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, Salman is a Shiite Muslim who fled to Saudi Arabia after a failed 1991 uprising against Iraq’s now deposed leader Saddam Hussein. Other returnees were former Iraqi soldiers who defected during the 1991 Gulf War.

The fearful refugees sought asylum in Saudi Arabia where they lived at the frontier Rafha camp. But the idea of returning home remained a remote dream until US-led forces ousted Saddam in April. The 240 returnees were among a group of 5,200 Iraqis in Rafha who had asked the authorities and the UNHCR to repatriate them. “Today marks the beginning of the end for the Rafha refugee camp,” said UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner Kamel Morjane. “We hope to repatriate everyone as soon as possible.

Moments after stepping off the bus, Yacoub Ghazi spied his sister Fatima among the crowd of relatives straining against the customs area fence. He flung himself into her arms and sobbed like a child. “Beloved, beloved, I didn’t think I would live to see you,” Fatima said, kissing her brother’s graying head repeatedly.

A British soldier prevented Najm Ali from scaling the fence to embrace his son Mohammed. “He has changed so much in the last 13 years,” an emotional Ali told Reuters as Mohammed processed his immigration papers. “I never thought I’d see him. Thank God that Saddam is gone.”

Layla Hassan went to Rafha aged just three, but after living almost all her life in Saudi Arabia, the veiled 16-year-old was ecstatic to be in Iraq. “I am home. I am Iraqi. I dreamed of this day,” she said.

Cradling her one-month-old daughter, with two toddlers in tow, Ibtisam Nouri could not believe she was home. Overcome, the only words she could manage were: “Thank God, thank God.”

In contrast with the bleak existence of many Iraqi refugees elsewhere, Rafha residents were given a monthly stipend by the Saudi government, food rations and air-conditioned houses.

Celebrating his new-found freedom, Thabet Qassem Al-Mansouri stepped off the bus holding aloft a picture of influential Shiite leader Mohammed Baqer Al-Hakim, who long opposed Saddam.

The refugees reached Umm Qasr, Iraq’s sole deep water port, aboard five buses, accompanied by five trucks carrying their belongings, and were headed up to the city of Basra. “I hope this first voluntary repatriation operation will be followed by similar small scale repatriations from Saudi Arabia and also from Iran,” Daniel Bellamy, the UNHCR Chief of Mission in Baghdad, said in a statement. The overall Iraq resettlement program launched in 1992 is one of the largest resettlement operations in UNHCR’s history, the agency said.

UNHCR chief Ruud Lubbers said in Kuwait last week that his agency had reached a tentative agreement with the US-led civil administration running Iraq to repatriate a limited number of Iraqi refugees from Iran.

“I will be positive so we will try to start the process, let us say, as of end of August,” he said. Lubbers, in Kuwait to seek financial help and to facilitate the movement of personnel and aid material into Iraq, said his agency needed at least $10 million a month to pay for its programs to help Iraqi refugees and those internally displaced.

(Additional input from AFP)