DAMASCUS, 14 February 2008 — Syrian President Bashar Assad met UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres yesterday to discuss the plight of Iraqi refugees in Syria, official news agency SANA reported.
They discussed “cooperation between the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Syria with regard to improving the conditions (of refugees) and finding solutions to their problems,” SANA added.
Bashar said all the “parties concerned need to assume their responsibilities” toward the refugees, while Guterres thanked Syria which has taken in 1.5 million Iraqi refugees. Since Oct. 1, the number of Iraqis traveling to Syria has dropped after new visa conditions were imposed by Damascus.
Almost 45,000 Iraqi refugees in Syria have returned home since mid-September, including 20,000 who traveled back in December, the Iraqi Red Cross said in January.
Of the 1.5 million Iraqis in Syria, the UN estimates there are 153,516 who are formally registered as refugees from the conflict that has wracked Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003.
Most fled after the bombing of a Shiite in Samarra in February 2006 that sparked deadly sectarian conflict between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites. At one stage, up to 60,000 Iraqis were fleeing across the border every month.
Iraqis are once again leaving Iraq for Syria in greater numbers than are returning, despite the lower level of bloodshed in their homeland, the UN refugee agency said earlier this month.
Meanwhile, four million Iraqis are struggling to feed themselves and 40 percent of the country’s 27 million people have no safe water, despite oil wealth and a booming economy, the UN said yesterday. With annual economic growth of around 7 percent, according to UN estimates, and a national budget of $48 billion, buoyed by oil exports of 1.6 million barrels per day, Iraq has the ingredients to be prosperous.
But insurgency and sectarian attacks have displaced more than two million people and left nearly twice as many hungry. “Four million Iraqis cannot guarantee they’re going to have food on their table tomorrow,” the United Nations humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, David Shearer, told Reuters at the launch of a $265 million appeal to donor governments for 2008.
The United Nations says the number of displaced people has roughly doubled since 2006 to nearly 2.5 million. High unemployment has left many others unable to feed themselves. Violence is down 60 percent across Iraq since last June, thanks to a surge of 30,000 extra US troops, a decision by Sunni tribal leaders to turn against Al-Qaeda and a cease-fire by Moqtada Sadr’s Shiite Mehdi Army.
Shearer said 36,000 displaced people had gone home in this period, a tiny fraction of the total who fled the violence. “We seeing a plateauing of the displacement,” Shearer said, adding Iraq was still too dangerous for foreign aid workers to move around or for the UN to have a large-scale presence.
Sadr, meanwhile, is keeping Iraq guessing over whether he will order a renewal of his Mehdi Army militia’s cease-fire when it expires at the end of the month.
