Exodus from Iraq unsettles Mideast

AMMAN, Jordan -- As Iraq's bloodshed worsens, the tide of refugees fleeing the country is straining the region's resources and inflaming fears that Iraq's sectarian conflict might spread to neighboring countries.

A new United Nations report says Iraq is "hemorrhaging" refugees in staggering numbers. Anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 people are fleeing the country every day.

After 3 1/2 years of nearly constant warfare, at least 1.5 million Iraqi refugees have moved to neighboring countries, reshaping the already complex demographic mosaics of Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The influx has prompted government crackdowns and anger from local populations who feel refugees are grabbing scarce jobs and resources.

Another 1.5 million people are displaced inside Iraq, many of them clamoring to leave but lacking the resources. Humanitarian agencies fear this group will drive a continued exodus that could quickly double the already massive refugee population in the region.

The mass migration out of the country is transforming the region's culture, a diaspora rivaled in size only by the 3 million Palestinian refugees, including descendants of those who fled conflicts with Israel since 1948. With no end in sight to the fighting in Iraq, governments in Syria and Jordan worry that Iraqis are becoming the new Palestinians -- a permanent refugee population that will import its sectarian and religious squabbles into the host countries.

But what makes this spiraling refugee crisis different, and uniquely unsettling to Iraq's neighbors, is that a great proportion of those with the resources to flee are rich and well-educated -- and thus able to command more influence than migrants with no resources.

Iraq's refugee crisis has had the most pronounced effect on Jordan, a US-allied kingdom with a population of only 4 million, as many as half of whom are Palestinian refugees.

An estimated 700,000 Iraqis are living in Jordan in a semi-legal limbo. The richest and most powerful Iraqis have long had offices and second homes in Amman, from where they can conduct business and politics with far more safety than in Baghdad.

Until recently, when Jordan began turning away Iraqis at the border, the poorest also poured into Amman -- the most convenient major city, with relatively convenient access to Iraq.

In the first two years of the war, Jordan admitted the refugees with few restrictions. But when Iraqi suicide bombers struck three Amman hotels a year ago, the kingdom reversed course, limiting the number of residency permits, turning away men between the ages of 18 and 35, and rounding up and deporting Iraqis.

Mustafa Ahmed, 29, an unemployed blacksmith, roams Amman's poor downtown, a warren of cheap clothing stores, flophouses, and street corners where day laborers seek jobs.

Ahmed said he's terrified that he'll be deported like his cousin, who was put on a bus from Amman to Baghdad two months ago when police caught him in a roundup. Halfway home, Sunni insurgents in Anbar Province pulled the cousin from the bus; when they saw his Shi'ite name on his identity card, Ahmed said, they executed him.

"If I go back, I will be killed on the road," Ahmed said, drawing a finger across his throat. Dressed in ratty workman's clothes, soiled jeans, and a dirty jacket, he spends his time drinking tea at a restaurant in downtown Amman frequented by other poor Iraqi refugees.

Syria is schooling the children of the 600,000 Iraqi refugees who live there. But Jordan has barred its already inadequate school system to Iraqis; only those Iraqis rich enough to afford private school can educate their children in Jordan.

Kristele Younes, a researcher who tracks displaced Iraqis in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan for the nonprofit advocacy group Refugees International, said Syria has been the most welcoming country for Iraqis, but like other Arab countries was running out of resources.

"Very slowly but surely, Iraqis are starting to be treated like Palestinians," Younes said in a telephone interview from Washington, where her group is based. "There is a complete lack of political will in the region to admit that these people are not going home any time soon."

Another group, Human Rights Watch, issued a scathing report last week, calling on Jordan to treat displaced Iraqis as refugees, allowing them to stay until the conflict in Iraq subsided and granting them basic rights, including public education for children.

Jordan and Syria are wary of Iraqis spreading that country's sectarian strife. Most countries face their own version of Shi'ite-Sunni rivalry and work hard to keep it from becoming violent.

UN agencies and human rights groups said they have gathered anecdotal evidence, based on interviews with refugees, that Jordan is seeking to buttress its own Sunni Arab population by allowing Iraqi Sunnis across its borders but denying haven to Shi'ites.

The organizations have no hard data on the demographics of the refugees, and none of the host governments will release any information about the refugee populations inside their borders.

Syria, meanwhile, is ruled by a small minority of Alawites, a small breakaway Shi'ite sect. The same observers believe that Syria has allowed Shi'ites and Christians who will support the regime to settle, but made it hard for Sunni Arabs. An outer ring of predominantly Shi'ite suburbs around the Syrian capital, Damascus, has exploded in population over the last three years, absorbing most of the Iraqi refugees.

Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch, who researched and wrote the report on Jordan's treatment of Iraqi refugees, said Jordanians had recently started to block entry by young men and poor Iraqis.

"The people they're admitting are better off," he said.

Most refugees haven't officially registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which normally handles refugee crises, because the agency has no resources to handle the influx and has stopped processing claims for refugee status. Aid groups have called on international donors -- in particular the United States and Britain, which led the invasion of Iraq -- to help host countries cover the costs of refugees.

But according to the UN estimates, Iraq is the second-greatest producer of refugees in the world, after Afghanistan. The actual number of refugees could easily top 2 million, UN officials said. About 10 percent of Iraq's prewar population of 26 million has fled the country over the last three years.

"Iraq is hemorrhaging. The humanitarian crisis which the international community had feared in 2003 is now unfolding," the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said in its November update. And because of insufficient resources in countries like Jordan and Syria, "tolerance is growing thin," the report added.

In Jordan, a population already suffering from high unemployment has begun to turn against the wealthy Iraqis who have snapped up apartments, created jobs -- usually for other Iraqis -- and created an investment boom that only benefits the very rich.

"They have driven up the prices of everything. They have brought nothing good here," said Nawruz Abida, who delivers tea and water pipes to downtown Amman shops. His family's rent has doubled since the influx of Iraqi refugees, Abida said.

Host countries are all too aware of Iraq's history of conflict.

Amman has become a home away from home for many Sunni Arabs sympathetic to the nationalist insurgency. Even before the fall of Saddam Hussein, Ba'athists and wealthy supporters of the regime had long had business and political ties to the elite in Jordan and Syria, and many now have taken refuge there.

"Only bringing back Saddam can restore stability," said Saleh Jabouri, a merchant who fled Baghdad six months ago and now moves between Damascus and Amman whenever his tourist visa expires.

Abbas F. Shamara, an Iraqi Shi'ite whose company builds power plants in Iraq, runs millions of dollars worth of construction projects in Jordan and the rest of the Middle East. He has homes in Amman and Baghdad and is nominally a refugee -- but he has residency in Jordan and has enrolled his three children in school there.

Shamara, 53, advises a senior Shi'ite cleric in Baghdad and commands the ear of many influential Americans and Iraqis because of the money at his disposal. His holding company has created several hundred jobs for Jordanians, and is building a new office tower in Amman, in part to blunt criticism that Iraqi migrants do nothing for their host countries.

"We've put millions of dollars into Jordan's economy," Shamara said in his Amman office. In contrast with Jordan, Shi'ites fit more comfortably in Syria, whose government is battling its own growing fundamentalist Sunni population. Syria has close ties to Iran, and last month restored diplomatic ties with the Baghdad government after a 24-year rupture.

With wealth and swagger unusual for a refugee population, the Iraqi exodus is already changing the fashion and the culture of the Middle East. That's no more apparent than in the nightlife of the cities the refugees now call home.

At 1 a.m. on a Tuesday at Amman's Al Zawyeh music club, a traditional Iraqi tribal singer belts out heart-rending folk songs about the nation, family, and war. It's a slow night; an older Iraqi couple sings along, and the woman rises from her table to dance slowly on the stage in front of the singer, Fadil Zeidan.

The club started out five years ago as a gallery for Iraqi artists, with Saddam Hussein as an investor. After the US invasion, however, and the flood of Iraqis to Amman, the gallery owners shuttered their restaurant chain in Iraq and turned Zawyeh into a music club.

Saif Ghariba, 24, the owner's son, said Baghdad's elite quickly reassembled in Amman and sought its old entertainments. The club has a distinctly Sunni and Ba'athist style, decorated with the heavy wood panels and well-lit whiskey bar characteristic of the haunts in Baghdad neighborhoods like Mansour and Jadriya that were fancied by the ruling Ba'athist class before the US invasion.

"Iraqis fled here and wanted to hear their music," Ghariba said. "Our music is full of poetry and emotion."