AMMAN, 24 March 2003 — Iraqi construction worker Fayez Kazem took his meager savings and headed for a bus stop in central Amman looking for a ride home. He said he could not sit in Jordan while Baghdad was under coalition attack.
Kazem was among a dozen Iraqi men who chose late Saturday to leave the security of Jordan and head home to “fight the Americans, because I cannot bear staying here and watching Baghdad burn on television,” he told AFP.
While UN and relief organizations are dug in on the Jordan-Iraq border awaiting a possible influx of Iraqi refugees, none are coming. Instead, a number of Iraqi expatriates are heading back.
“We Iraqis are born with a gun in our hand,” said Kazem, who fled to Jordan illegally four years ago to escape economic hardships in Iraq that have prevailed since the 1991 Gulf war amid UN sanctions.
On Saturday Kazem and 13 other Iraqi workers tried desperately to persuade bus and taxi drivers to brave the desert roads and take them back to Iraq, pledging to give up all their savings for the trip.
Sattar Mohammad, a butcher from the southern Iraqi town of Basra, said he was not afraid to make the perilous journey home. “Death is the same, here or in Iraq. But it becomes more honorable when it happens in your own country,” he said.
Mohammad has no concern about leaving his wife and three children behind in Jordan. “Who will defend our families and our honor in Iraq? Must I stay in Amman when the Americans are killing my family and attacking my sisters?”
His new comrades in arm are equally angry and do not hesitate to vent it against Arabs who they accuse of having betrayed Iraq, and the Arab media which they say speak of “American attacks” instead of “occupation.”
“We fought many Arab battles but where are the Arabs now? Why don’t they fight with us?” said Raed Mohammad Jawad, who was heading back to Basra. Jawad said he had been calling his family in Iraq every day since the US and British launched attacks on Iraq Thursday and was told that life there “is normal.”
“They’ve told me that the people were out and about and not afraid. Everything being reported by the media about the people being afraid and the defeat of the Iraqi Army are lies,” Jawad said.
Jawad also insisted that the Iraqi people were steadfast and would not flee the military inferno. “Not one Iraqi will leave his country, I am certain of that. We are used to wars and fighting and we want to die in our homeland,” he said.
Jordan has set up two temporary camps for refugees fleeing Iraq along its eastern border, one for Iraqis and the other one for third-country nationals, but so far not one single Iraqi has sought shelter there.
Jawad and his friends bitterly negotiated a fare to Baghdad with taxi and bus drivers in central Amman, with some flatly rejecting their bid and others asking as much as $3,000 for a trip that used to cost $150.
Like many of his colleagues, taxi driver Abu Rami has decided to hang up his car keys and sit tight at home in Amman rather than risk his life on the road to “terror.”
“I returned Friday from Baghdad, driving to the Jordanian border for eight hours and never seeing a single human being,” said Abu Rami, a veteran driver on the Baghdad-Amman road.
