Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“Their need is enormous,” a top official at UNHCR told me. “The temptation is there. The money from bin Laden is there. If the international community doesn’t help, then the other groups will, and all hell will break loose. Iraqis are sitting in Syria or Jordan, where the Baathists and Wahhabis are strongest. If 1 percent of the two million can be bought, then that is very dangerous. If they stay on the street you will have youth violence or terrorism. If people are in need they turn to crime or terrorism.” He mentioned the North African community of France as a model, some of whom were drawn to Islamic radicalism or terrorism out of frustration and neglect. “They come to the UN and queue at our door for five hours to get a registration card, or they can turn to radical groups for funding,” he said, explaining that the money came from Saudi Arabia to Jordan and was disbursed there. “This problem will be with us for a long time,” he added, shaking his head in frustration.

Many poor Iraqi refugees settled in the Jaramana district of Damascus. They came to the Ibrahim al-Khalil convent for assistance. The convent was the only white structure amid the graying and incomplete buildings surrounding it, many of which were so hastily thrown together that they were unpainted and lacked glass in the windows. In front of the convent I found a small bakery preparing the typical Iraqi bread known as samun , a thick pita with two pointy ends. The owner, Haidar, had left Iraq three months earlier “because of the occupation,” he told me. In Baquba he had been a sports teacher.

Sister Malaki, an elderly nun who ran the convent, expressed wonder at how quickly the neighborhood had been built since the Iraqis began showing up. Until 2006 there were no buildings around the convent, she said. It used to take her thirty minutes just to see a taxi on the street, and now she had to wait an hour to find an empty taxi. The first wave arrived in the spring of 2006, she said, but the biggest wave began in the fall of 2006. At first she saw many cases of rape, including boys and girls only ten or twelve years old. “Now it’s mostly cases of extreme poverty and people who will never go back to Iraq,” she said. “They fully reject returning to Iraq. They will die.”

She had worked in a hospital in Beirut throughout the Lebanese civil war and was seeing similar traumas. “The children have a strong fear,” she said. When asking her for something many children would threaten her, she said. “If you don’t give it to us we will tell the Americans,” she repeated with laughter. “Any nation that goes into a civil war,” she said, “the pressure makes them bitter. They ask, ‘Why us and not you?’ Today I was insulted by three different Iraqis. They feel entitled: ‘We suffered, you didn’t.’ The people who really suffer are those who had a lot—educated, university people. Now they are begging. They show me pictures of what they had.”

Um Iman worked as a cleaner in the convent. She had come with her husband and three daughters two months earlier. They were Christians and had lived in Baghdad’s Dora neighborhood. They had received four letters threatening them with death if they did not leave. One night they took a taxi to a relative’s house in Baghdad, and the next morning they joined a convoy of buses heading to the Syrian border. “There were explosions behind us and in front of us,” she said. Her husband looked for work every day but could find none. She looked defeated to me. “What can we do?” she asked with resignation. “Even if I die of hunger here I don’t want to go back to Iraq. Now there are no Christians in Baghdad.”

As Iraq fell apart its human detritus was scattered throughout the region. Lost amid the millions of Cairo, Iraqis could be found struggling with the bureaucracy in the Mugamaa, the massive labyrinthine edifice where all people’s interactions with the Egyptian state began and ended. On the first floor, in the Arab Nations section of the Visa Renewal section, past Somalis and Sudanese sitting and awaiting their turn, was a sign that said, “Booth 23 for Iraqis only.” When I visited in late February 2006 the crowds of Iraqis there exceeded the numbers at the nearby section for Palestinian refugees. Iraqis continued to enter Egypt by the planeload. They came on tourist visas at first, but extended them indefinitely or applied for temporary protection at the UNHCR, and settled into the urban sprawl of Cairo.

In the Medinat Nasr district, past the Layali Baghdad (Baghdad Nights) restaurant, I found a small Internet cafe owned by Muhamad Abu Rawan, a twenty-seven-year-old Sunni man who fled Iraq on May 15, 2006, with his wife, Lubna, also twenty-seven. Muhamad walked me to their nearby apartment, where we found Lubna watching a soap opera and holding their three-month-old daughter, Rawa. Their home was sparsely decorated: flower patterns on the sofas and carpets, pictures of a forest, a beach and a lake on the walls. Both Muhamad and Lubna were from Basra. Back in Baghdad Muhamad had worked repairing air conditioners for the same electronic appliance company where Lubna, a civil engineer, worked.

At first they both spoke Egyptian Arabic with me, because, like most Iraqis, they had quickly assimilated into Egyptian culture and had learned the dialect from the country’s famous soap operas and films. At the beginning of the American occupation, Lubna told me, “Our lives were normal, like all Iraqis. Every once in a while the Americans would besiege the area, but my father was never politically active, so the Americans never bothered us.” One morning in December 2004, Lubna’s father, also a civil engineer and structural designer, drove toward the Mansour district to pay his contractors. He took the airport road and got off at the exit that would take him to Mansour, but the roads had been blocked by American soldiers, who were conducting an operation in the area.

In Yarmuk’s Qahtan Square American soldiers fired into the air as Lubna’s father drove. He sped away to avoid the shots. Perhaps thinking he was attacking them, one American soldier fired at him, and then several others opened fire as well. “He did not have time to close his eyes before he died,” Lubna told me, because there were so many shots in his body. She showed me pictures of his bullet-riddled car, with holes in every side. “That year the Americans were killing many Iraqis on the street,” Muhamad explained. Lubna, her mother, and her two sisters did not learn about his death until later that afternoon, when Iraqi police contacted them. Their neighbors persuaded them to demand compensation, and they approached one of the lawyers the Americans had authorized to deal with such cases. “After one year the lawyer said the Americans had rejected it twice,” Lubna told me as she rocked Rawa steadily and patted her back. The Americans did offer her family seven hundred dollars, but they rejected it as a paltry sum. “My mother had to go back to work as a teacher because my father was the only provider,” Lubna told me.

At the time, Muhamad still lived in Baghdad’s volatile Dora district, where Shiites and Christians were targeted by Sunni militias. When he picked up a wounded Shiite from the street and took him to the hospital, he found himself targeted by the Sunni militia that had shot the man. They told him they would have killed him were he not a Sunni and forced him to move out of Dora. One year after her father was killed, Lubna and Muhamad got married. They lived with her mother in Hai Jihad, a majority-Sunni district Muhamad described as “very hot.” Two days after they were married, there was a joint American and Iraqi operation in their neighborhood. One hundred and fifty Sunnis were arrested, he told me. “The Americans would surround the neighborhood, and the Iraqi police commandos raided the houses. It was our neighbors and friends. They still haven’t been released.”