Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Ayman was a vegetable seller from Baladiyat. He still spoke in the Palestinian dialect he had inherited from his family, which had been expelled from Palestine when his father was five years old. “My grandfather was my age when he was expelled,” Ayman said. “Now it wasn’t Jews who expelled us, it was Arabs.” Shiite militiamen had attacked his house and killed his mother and brother. Ayman had fled with his wife and two children and hoped to live anywhere as long as it was safe.

Yasser and his father had been arrested by the Iraqi National Guard. “They accused me of being Palestinian,” he said. “They said, ‘You are a Palestinian terrorist’ and ‘You Arabs, you destroyed us.’” The two were imprisoned for sixteen days and tortured with electricity. Yasser’s nails were torn out. Then his seventy-three-year-old father was electrocuted to death in front of him. The National Guardsmen then gave him twenty-four hours to leave Iraq, and in June 2006 he and his family arrived in Al Tanf. “We paid to get my father’s body,” he cried, “but they gave me the wrong body.” The other men stared down silently as he sobbed. “All I want to know is where my father’s body is.”

Another man was taken out of his car along with six other Palestinians. All were shot and killed, but he survived. He was denied treatment in the first hospital because he was Palestinian. After he was released from the second hospital, he fled to the border. “Even in another camp right on the border, the Iraqi army came to the camp and arrested five of us for eight days,” he said. “They tortured us during that time and robbed us of everything we had. They even took my wedding ring. In Baghdad also they took our houses and cars. Here we have a tragic life, we have gone through cold, heat, dust, and this wind. It is a very bad life. But what is the reason? It is only because we are Palestinians and carry with us Palestinian travel documents. Now we want to live anywhere that is safe and secure. Anywhere. In Iraq they kill us because of our identity.”

One family in Al Tanf received a CD with a film of their daughter’s gang rape and murder by Shiite militiamen as their final warning to leave Iraq. Three men in the camp with the Sunni name Omar had been followed merely for being called Omar and had survived assassination attempts. The camp provided scant protection, and some men who went close to the Iraqi border to purchase vegetables from locals were captured by the Iraqi National Guard. “They think we are Saddamists,” one man told me. “The American occupation didn’t protect us.” Palestinians who went to get relatives from the morgue were also kidnapped. One baby was born in Al Tanf, and she was named Khiyam, meaning “tent” in Arabic. “We went backward sixty years,” one man lamented. “We were born in tents, and our children will be the same. Is this our legacy?”

According to a UN official, Arab governments were reluctant to call the Iraqis refugees because the term is associated with the Palestinians. “The Palestinians are a people without a land,” he said. “Iraqis still have a country, although I think it will break up like the former Yugoslavia. It is not positive to be associated with the Palestinians.” Jordan, with half its population made up of Palestinian refugees, was afraid of a second refugee wave.

No discussion of refugees in the Middle East can begin without addressing the Palestinian experience. Between 1947 and 1949 up to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from Palestine by Jewish militias; hundreds of Palestinian villages were wiped off the map. They were dispersed throughout the region, unable to return home and unable to assimilate fully into the countries to which they fled. They soon organized, forming armed groups and trying to return home. These groups were often manipulated by various governments in the region for their own ends, and some even fought one another. Their presence contributed to the destabilization of several countries, while in places like Lebanon, they were preyed upon by more powerful militias, as we shall see in the next chapter. Their cause became a rallying cry. After 2003, radical groups based in the camps exported fighters to Iraq.

The flow of fighters into Iraq, of millions of refugees out of Iraq, the smuggling of weapons and even sheep, and the export of dangerous ideas such as sectarianism and jihadism demonstrated that the Iraqi civil war was close to becoming a regional conflict. One factor militating against such a development was the fact that the Iraqi refugees had not settled in camps but instead had been absorbed into cities like Beirut, Damascus, Amman, and Cairo, which made it more difficult to organize or mobilize them, though also more difficult to help or monitor them. Like the Palestinians, most Iraqi refugees may never return home. The decimated Christian and Sabean minorities had left for good. Sunnis from Baghdad and the south, now cleansed and controlled by Shiites, were also likely never to return. Although the Palestinian cause and its initial popularity in the Arab world eased their integration into Syria and elsewhere, and they were tolerated and even welcomed with generosity by the local population in some instances, this goodwill did not last forever. In Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, and elsewhere, it ran out. Jordan and particularly Syria have shown extreme generosity, but they are both straining under the burden.

Damascus became so full of Iraqis that rent prices soared, driving many refugees as far as Aleppo. One hour away from Damascus, in Qudsiya, I found an Iraqi neighborhood with a “Baghdad Barbershop” and “Iraq Travel Agency.” Off an alley I entered a hastily constructed apartment building, rough and unfinished, cement and cinder blocks thrown together without paint. The carved wooden doors to each apartment were a stark contrast to the grim hallways. Inside I found Dr. Lujai and her five children. At fifteen, Omar was the oldest; the youngest was two years old. Dr. Lujai, a family medicine specialist with her own clinic, had lived in Baghdad with her husband, Dr. Adil, a thoracic surgeon and professor at the medical college. Both were forty-three-year-old Sunnis who originally came from Ana, a town in the Anbar province. They had been married for fifteen years.

Right after the war Dr. Lujai began to notice changes. Shiite clerics took over many of Baghdad’s hospitals following the postwar looting, and they did not know how to manage a hospital. “They were sectarian from the beginning,” she said, “firing Sunnis, saying they were Baathists. In 2004 the Ministry of Health was given to the Sadr movement, and the minister was only a general practitioner.” Following the 2005 elections the Sadrist ministers initiated what they called a “campaign to remove the Saddamists.” The advisers to the minister of health wore the turbans of clerics and mismanaged the ministry. In hospitals and health centers, walls were covered with posters of Shiite clerics. Traditional Shiite music could often be heard in the halls.

Sunni doctors began disappearing. Ali al-Mahdawi, who managed the Diyala province’s health department, was said to have gone into the ministry for a meeting and never came out. Several months later, American military raids uncovered secret prisons run by Ministry officials with hundreds of prisoners. Several days after Mahdawi was released, he was murdered on the street. A pharmacist they knew called Ahmed al-Azzawi went in for a meeting with the minister and was killed by his militia.

Dr. Lujai reported that Sunni patients were accused by Sadrist officials of being terrorists. After the doctors completed their operations, she said, the Interior Ministry’s special police would arrest the patients. Their corpses would then be found in the Baghdad morgue. “This happened tens of times,” she said, to “anybody who came with bullet wounds and wasn’t Shiite.” Dr. Lujai knew of five Sunni doctors and two Christians who were threatened to leave or fired.