Passport rule change in US keeps Iraqis out

WASHINGTON -- The US government last month stopped accepting all but the latest version of Iraqi passports, effectively barring hundreds -- potentially thousands -- of Iraqis with valid US visas from entering the United States, including some students at Boston-area universities.

The move has stranded Iraqi families around the world and made it more difficult for countless others to flee the chaos-ridden country, according to Iraqi officials.

In January, the United States said it would no longer accept most previously issued Iraqi passports because they were too easily forged. Instead, Iraqis entering the United States have to have newly issued, electronically readable passports. But none of Iraq's 50 embassies around the world has the machines required to produce the new passports, Samir Sumaida'ie, Iraq's ambassador to the United States, said in an interview yesterday.

Sumaida'ie said the State Department gave the Iraqi government no time to prepare for the change, announcing on Jan. 8 that, effective immediately, the new passports would be required. He said it would be months before the embassies receive the new machines and training needed to produce the new kind of passport

Now Iraqi citizens are being told that the only way to get a valid passport is to travel to Baghdad. But Sumaida'ie acknowledged that it would be an extreme hardship for most Iraqis abroad to make such a trip.

"It is a bit unfair to demand that people go to Baghdad," he said. "There is the expense, the risk, the security situation. It is difficult for people, so they are left with very hard choices. . . . Many people who want to travel are inconvenienced, or indeed stranded."

Omar Dewachi , a doctoral student in anthropology at Harvard, has been trying since October to get back to Cambridge from Montreal, where he has been writing his dissertation. Traveling to and from the United States has never been easy because the US government requires him to reapply for his student visa each time he leaves the country. This week, US officials called Dewachi to say that he had finally gotten the visa, three months after he applied, but that his passport was now invalid.

Dewachi thought it would be a simple matter of getting a new passport from the consulate in Ottawa. But he says that when he called, officials there told him that he would have to go to Baghdad.

"It's a bureaucratic nightmare," Dewachi said in a telephone interview from Montreal.

Dewachi said he has no intention of going to Baghdad, a city he hasn't visited since 1998 and where he has no remaining family members.

"If you read the reports from Iraq, they are killing guys named Omar," he said, referring to the sectarian strife between Shi'ite and Sunni Muslims. Omar is a Sunni name.

The Ministry of Interior, which is in charge of issuing the new passports in Baghdad, has been widely accused of involvement in attacks and the torture and imprisonment of Sunni civilians.

Dewachi hopes that the Canadian government will issue him a special travel document to enable him to go to the United States, which the US consulate in Montreal said it would accept. But others don't have that option.

Since the new policy went into effect, Iraq's embassy in Washington has been flooded with calls from Iraqis around the world, some of whom spent their savings to buy a plane ticket out of the chaotic capital, only to be told to go back home because their visas were issued in passports that are now considered invalid. Even an Iraqi diplomat at the United Nations who had traveled out of the country was turned back, despite her valid diplomatic credentials.

Tim Irwin , spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said Baghdad is so dangerous that none of the estimated 2 million Iraqis living outside the country should be forced to return to renew a passport.

"We would say that nobody should be deported or sent back against their will because of the current security situation in the country," Irwin said.

About 50,000 Iraqis leave the country every month, Irwin said. Most go by road to neighboring Syria or Jordan, where authorities have also begun to issue stricter rules for Iraqis who want to enter and take up residency. The US government has been criticized -- most vocally by Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy -- for failing to bring more than a few hundred Iraqi refugees into the United States.

The new State Department policy has affected those trying to travel to the United States not as refugees but as students and business people. From September to December of last year, the State Department issued 1,119 nonimmigrant visas to Iraqis, including business and student visas. Now those who have been issued those visas but have not yet entered the United States must get a valid passport and go through the process again.

Iraq's government has only been making the new, electronically readable "G" series passports since April. The vast majority of Iraqis with passports are believed to carry the "S" series, which was issued as a temporary travel document by Iraq's interim government, or the "M" or "N" series, issued under Saddam Hussein's regime.

The Iraqi government recently declared the "M" series passports invalid, but extended the "N" series until the end of the year. Also still valid is the rare "H" series, which was issued shortly before the fall of Hussein in March 2003.

State Department spokesman Steven Royster said that only the old passports didn't meet international security requirements, and that only "G" and "H" would be accepted. Indeed, much of Europe, including the United Kingdom, has already banned the older Iraqi documents after evidence of widespread fraud. The Iraqi embassy in Sweden alone has been accused of issuing several thousand passports with false identities. Last week, Iraq's ambassador to Sweden was summoned to the Swedish Foreign Ministry to explain the high frequency of fraudulent passports, according to published reports.

Marcella Bombardieri of the Globe staff contributed to this report.