The Legacy, Part Nine

Refugees, internal and external

Photo:  May 27, 2010

Homeless Iraqis Prompt Fears ofSocial Crisis

Half a million displaced Iraqis face grim future in squalid squatter camps.  “We registered 160,000 [squatters] in Baghdad a year ago and this March the number was up to 260,000. This is only for Baghdad, we haven't published figures for the whole country yet but it's at least up from 400,000 to 500,000 for the time being,” Daniel Endres, Iraq representative of UNHCR, said."

Huge numbers ofIraqis still adrift within the country

December 11, 2011

Of all the problems that the U.S. troop withdrawal won't affect in Iraq, what to do about the number of internally displaced people looms the largest. As many as 2 million Iraqis — about 6 percent of the country's estimated population of more than 31 million — are thought to have been forced from the cities and towns where they once lived and are housed in circumstances that feel temporary and makeshift. More than 500,000 of those are "squatters in slum areas with no assistance or legal right to the properties they occupy," according to Refugees International, a Washington-based advocacy group. Most can't go home: Either their homes have been destroyed or hostile ethnic and sectarian groups now control their neighborhoods. Those who are displaced internally say the Iraqi government has done little or nothing to help them, and in some cases has even prevented them from returning to their homes. 

Photo:  Staff members from the Baghdad bureau of Knight Ridder, which later became McClatchy, on June 28, 2004, marking the official end of the U.S.-led occupation authority. Clockwise from left, Dogen Hannah, Abdelwahab Abdelrazak, Yasser Salihee, Omar Jassim, Ali Jassim, David George, Tom Lasseter, Pauline Lubens, Ken Dilanian, Hassan Abdul Hassan and Hannah Allam. | MCT

War forever changed the lives of sixIraqis we knew well

More than seven years later, with U.S. troops almost gone from Iraq ahead of the Dec. 31 withdrawal deadline, these are the fates of the six Iraqi staffers in that photo: One is dead, one is an amputee, one was internally displaced and the others are refugees in Sweden, Australia and the United States. Just one still lives in Iraq, and he was forced to move to a different neighborhood after a double car bombing in January 2010 left his house in ruins. The same blasts partially demolished the hotel where the picture was taken and killed a friendly young worker in the bakery where we’d ordered the cake. The postscripts to that photo encapsulate the ruinous aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion, which set off years of sectarian warfare and political paralysis that have touched the lives of virtually all of Iraq’s more than 30 million citizens.

Iraq war commemorations ignore ongoinghumanitarian disaster

And the displacement is continuing. According to a new report by Minority Rights Group International, many minorities “face targeted threats and violence, the destruction of their places of worship, the loss of homes and property and lack of government protection of their rights. This violence has caused significant numbers of minorities to flee Iraq, in some cases decimating communities to the point that they risk disappearing altogether from their ancient homeland.”

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Overall, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reports that at least half of Iraq’s pre-2003 Christian community, once around a million strong, has left the country, probably never to return. This trend essentially terminates Christianity’s nearly two millennium-long presence in Mesopotamia. Baghdad’s Jewish population has been reduced to less than ten.

      

At least some Americans have heard that Christians and Jews are fleeing the country for their lives, but how many have ever heard of Chaldeans, Syriacs, Assyrians, Circassians, Baha’is, Black Iraqis, Roma, Faili Kurds, Kaka’i, Sabean Mandaeans, Shabaks, Turkmen, and Yazidis?

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Most estimates are two million to two and a half million internally displaced. And most of them are desperately poor.  Another two million or so left the country entirely, and many of them are poor also, although they started out with more money in the beginning. These people have had their lives destroyed.