notes on Iraqi refugees

A Vancouver based writer and journalist, Deborah Campbell, wrote an interesting article on a relatively under-reported development, which was published in the current issue of Harper’s Magazine. The piece is called “Exodus: Where will Iraq go next?” and it covers the state of Iraqi refugees.

The Iraq war and the sectarian violence, between Sunnis and Shiites, have created unimaginably unlivable conditions for Iraq’s inhabitants. Many have been displaced – 2.5 million within Iraq, and 2.5 million from Iraq. Most of those displaced from Iraq have gone to Syria, although you can find large numbers spread throughout the Middle East. Yet, these refugees haven’t escaped their troubles upon reaching Syria. The Prime Minister of Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, in concert with the Bush administration’s goal of feigning progress and stability in Iraq, has tried to bring the refugees back to Iraq. He wants Syria to close its borders to the influx of Iraqis searching for safety, and for Syria to stop handing out the residency permits Iraqi refugees use to stay temporarily out of the Iraq war. By bringing the refugees back, and claiming they were able to do so because of a renewal of stability, Bush and the Iraqi government can unjustifiably maintain what Campbell calls a “narrative of impending triumph”. Many Iraqis in Syria have eventually lost their residency permits, thus forced to return again; and many have returned because they had run out of money. But why didn’t they have anywhere else to go?

Iraqis trying to move abroad have faced other obstacles. Campbell mentions the “material support ban” on immigrants who have supported terrorist groups, financially or otherwise. A very reasonable ban, to be sure. But, it has been so loosely defined as to become unfair to a lot of innocents seeking asylum.

The ban is so broadly applied that any Iraqi who has paid ransom to such groups – and rare is the Iraqi who has not had a friend of relative kidnapped – is considered to have materially supported terrorists and is thus, along with his or her spouse and children, ineligible for resettlement.

Those Iraqis remaining in Syria, bracing the financial strain and the realization they are not for the most part wanted in the West, and somehow unbowed in the face of pressure to return home (if you could call it home anymore), are once again experiencing exactly the kind of sectarian violence and constant intimidation they tried to leave behind. In the Syrian suburb where Campbell spent time, Sayeda Sainab, Iraqis were locked in a tragic fate Sisyphus would have understood:

Stories were circulating of young girls being sold as brides to rich men in the Gulf. An Iraqi widow was strangled by a family member in an “honor killing” for engaging in prostitution to support her children. A wealthy Iraqi man was kidnapped from his home in Damascus and forced to pay a $100,000 ransom, and three Iraqi ex-generals were discovered bound and strangled in an apartment in Sayeda Zainab. Another ex-general, a neighbour, fled as soon as the bodies were discovered, and no one knows where he went or where he will go next.

And so, like an Escher sketch, we return to the beginning, the article’s subtitle: “Where will Iraq go next?”