DAMASCUS, Syria, 4 June 2008 — On our last day in Syria, our interpreter, Sameer, asked us a favor.
“Please tell my brother not to go back to Baghdad,” he said. “He’ll be killed.”
Sameer, 29, had spent 17 months as a translator for the US Army in his native Iraq before fleeing the country two years ago after someone nailed a death threat to his family’s door. He is in the final stages of a Byzantine process that we hope will lead to his resettlement in Texas. But his older brother, Duried, has been waiting for an interview with the international agencies that determine Iraqi refugees’ fates. He is running out of patience, hope and money.
“I can survive here maybe three more months,” Duried later told us over tea in Sameer’s small apartment, echoing a sentiment we heard from dozens of Iraqis in Syria. “After that, I cannot even pay rent. Honestly, what choice do I have?”
Damascus is the epicenter of the Middle East’s gravest humanitarian disaster since the Palestinian refugee crisis of 1948. We traveled there this spring to learn more about the plight of Iraqi refugees and the international community’s tepid response. Unlike its neighbors, who have imposed strict visa requirements, Syria has done little to discourage the flow of migrants across its border and hosts an estimated 1.4 million Iraqis — almost two-thirds of the post-invasion diaspora. With no legal status or right to work, their prospects are bleak. The wealthy and well-connected found their way to richer countries, and Syria’s dysfunctional relations with the West have hamstrung efforts to provide assistance.
The countries best positioned to help are paralyzed by petty politics and legitimate alarm at the daunting scope of the problem and are allowing the crisis to fester. Much of the Middle East — including Jordan, which once welcomed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — has now closed its borders, concerned that, like the Palestinians who 60 years ago fled what is now Israel, the Iraqis might never leave.
The United States, which is more responsible for the burgeoning humanitarian disaster than any other nation, has pledged $208 million — the equivalent of a rounding error in a war costing hundreds of millions a day. In 2008, Washington agreed to take in 12,000 Iraqis — just one-fifth the US target for refugees from Bhutan. Sweden, which played no role in the Iraq invasion, has accepted 40,000 Iraqis since the war began, while the United States has resettled slightly more than 5,000.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; in all his public speeches about the war, President Bush has virtually never mentioned Iraqi refugees. Recent legislation expands refugee resettlement for Iraqis affiliated with the United States and allows them to apply directly at US embassies.
But it will be of no use in Syria, which requires all Iraqis to go through the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and prohibits giving preference to those who aided the Americans in Iraq. Because of this inaction, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in Syria face the same, sad dilemma: Protect their families as refugees outside Iraq or provide for them by returning.
Media reports suggest that Iraqis are returning because of declining violence. But a recent United Nations-sponsored survey refutes this myth, finding that 46 percent of those who left “can no longer afford to live in Syria,” while just 14 percent returned because “they heard that the security situation has improved.”
The refugees we met who are considering going back cited financial hardship as the main reason, though most said that returning at all was unthinkable.
Another UN survey, conducted in February, found that only 4 percent of refugees in Syria plan to return. Absorbed into ramshackle apartments rather than makeshift camps, most Iraqis are barred by law from working and survive on their dwindling savings.
Duried, who in Baghdad ran a prominent construction company, hasn’t earned a penny since he left.
Already, Iraqi women and girls are turning to prostitution and young boys to black-market labor.
When he announced a massive relief and resettlement effort for Iraqi Kurds in 1991, the first President Bush called such a project part of the “American tradition” to “do everything in our power to save innocent life.”
Today, his son’s near silence stands in stark contrast — fueled, it seems, by a desire to avoid acknowledging the implication that Iraq is still many years from stability.
