The world's fastest growing refugee crisis
Dahr Jamail
Copied from Socialist Alternative June 2007 magazine

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist whose reports from Iraq have provided a crucial "unembedded" look at the reality of the US occupation. Earlier this year, he returned to the Middle East to cover one of the unreported tragedies of the war - what the United Nations calls the fastest-growing refugee crisis on the planet. He spoke to Eric Ruder from Socialist Worker (US) about what he saw.

You witnessed first hand the scale of the Iraq refugee crisis. Can you talk about that?

The office of the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] estimates that 1-1.2 million Iraqis are in Syria. But the regional public information officer for UNHCR said that the real figure is probably closer to that given by the Syrian government of 1.4-1.5 million. Even going with conservative figures, Iraqis are now roughly 8 per cent of the population of Syria.

Within Iraq, we have another 1.9 million internally displaced people. In Jordan, there's over 800,000 Iraqis. Then another 150,000 to Lebanon, 150,000 to Egypt, and we don't know how many to Iran, Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

About one out of every six Iraqis has had to flee their home because of the violence spread by the occupation. It's the largest exodus in the Middle East since the state of Israel was created in Palestine in 1948.

The UN calls it the fastest-growing refugee crisis on the planet. Just in Syria alone, we're talking about 50,000 people a week coming over the border.

Just as important as the figures is what this looks like on the ground in Syria.

Syria is a country that had roughly 25 per cent unemployment before this crisis began, and now there's an additional 1 million to 1.5 million people added into that economy. Iraqis aren't allowed to work.

So Iraqis are flooding into these areas that are already very poor. Now there's a big housing shortage, so landlords are asking exorbitant prices to rent an apartment, and they're paying it. The concern to Iraqis, to the government of Syria and to UNHCR is how much of this can Syria bear. This is a poor country. It's small and doesn't have the resources.

The UNHCR is completely overwhelmed. They don't have enough money or enough people. People lining up at the UNHCR to try to get aid face a six-month wait. It used to be they could get an appointment the same day, then it was a month wait, then it was two months, then it was four months, and now it's six months. And that, of course, is going to keep increasing.

The majority of people leaving are completely traumatised. They left under desperate conditions, many of them having received direct death threats. Many were still getting death threats (even though they had left the country) on their cell phones or getting emails. I interviewed a couple of Sunni doctors who had to leave simply because their name is Omar, which is a classic Sunni name.

What are the conditions that people are living in?

The situation runs the gamut. Those who can afford it - usually, the upper middle class, who were able to get their families out and had enough money put away - are either buying houses or renting apartments, and able to house everyone relatively comfortably. Although now, they don't have jobs, and so it's only a matter of time until their money runs out.

Then, as you move down the economic ladder, those at the very bottom are literally begging on the streets for food. They have nothing. They left Iraq literally with the shirt on their backs, whatever they had in their wallets, and their lives. There are actual refugee camps, with the stereotypical tents, open sewage and really horrible living situations. But for the most part, the majority of people are going into the poorer neighbourhoods.

People are in a state of shock. They made a big push to get out to Syria with their lives, and they get there and they're relieved. But then, the reality sets in: Where do we go from here, how am I going to feed myself, how am I going to feed my family?

What did people tell you about the conditions in Iraq today?

There's just nothing left. Everyone that I spoke with was saying that nothing is functioning. There's no garbage collection, there are no jobs, there's only violence - just bombs and gunfights going off all night and all day. People tried to minimise their time outside, only going out to try to find food. Otherwise, they sat at home and tried to figure out when they should try to leave the country altogether.

People are leaving absolute hell. The Damascus information person for UNHCR said that it's some of the grimmest information he's ever heard - that it's just unfathomable what people are running away from. And those who aren't able to leave are having to stay and try to live through that.

The majority of people we spoke with had lost some family member or relative, or at the very least, a close friend. Everyone knows someone who's been killed. The Lancet report, which found 655,000 dead since the invasion, is now almost a year out of date.

There's death and killing everywhere. We would ask people whether there was an event that occurred that made them realise it was time to go, no matter what it took. One husband (75) said, "I woke up one day, and looked out, and there were three more bodies in our front yard, and I just got tired of that. We knew it was probably only a matter of time before something would happen to us, so we decided to leave."

The US government claims it's recognising the refugee crisis and offering more options for Iraqis to come to the US. Is that true?

This was just propaganda. From March 2003 until today, the Bush administration has issued 466 visas to Iraqis. Under pressure, the Bush administration said it would issue 7,000 more visas. There's no evidence that any have been issued. But even if they issued all 7,000 visas tomorrow, we're talking about 7,000 out of 4 million displaced people.

There's really nothing to salvage in Iraq now as far as the sentiment toward the United States. Anything left of the idea that the US had any decent intentions of helping the Iraqi people was lost long before most of these people left the country. They sat there and watched their country burn, to the point where there's really nothing left, so they finally just fled. Most of the people I spoke with had to leave everything. You can't decide, well, I'm going to leave, so I'm going to sell my house in Baghdad. It's not like there's a housing market there. It's an exodus. People are leaving their houses full of furniture, they're leaving their pets, they're leaving cars, they're leaving most of their belongings at home.

To reach that point where they're willing to make that decision to just leave, they long before lost faith in anything the United States was going to do regarding their country.

So is the idea of the US waging a "war on terror" completely discredited?

Nobody really ever bought that. Just about everyone in the Middle East is so much more politically astute and aware than the average person here. They've been living with US and Israeli policy making their lives miserable for decades.

When you talk to people in Iraq, or coming out, the most common thing you hear is, "Who's the terrorist now? We're the ones being terrorised. We're the ones who are having to flee our homes. We're living in terror because of this US policy, so you tell us who the terrorist is."

There seem to be two competing tendencies - of people uniting in opposition to US imperialism and Israeli violence, but also the US stoking a sectarian civil war, and driving people apart. How do you think the pendulum is swinging now?

When we talk about sectarianism, it's important to remember that the primary cause is the occupation. There are differences between Shia and Sunni, and there have been tensions between them in the past, but there's never been civil war in Iraq. There's never been instances of Shia attacking Sunni or vice versa simply because these are different sects of Islam.

The conflict has been propagated, fostered and sponsored by the occupation forces. It's well documented that the death squads in Iraq were being set up under US Ambassador John Negroponte. And the same policies continue to this day - so soldiers of the Shia Badr Brigade militia or Kurdish peshmerga militia members are sent into Fallujah to fight against a primarily Sunni resistance.

As long as the US is there pulling strings behind the scenes and supporting a puppet government that doesn't represent Iraqis on the ground, then there will be no peace.

As we speak, there are groups working together that are representing Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, Turkmen, Christian and secular trends - there are groups trying to make this happen. But these attempts won't have any broad national support across Iraq, because the US won't allow it. The occupation depends on pitting these groups against one another and maintaining the divisions - deepening them and widening them.

That's another argument about why the occupation has to end.