Nir Rosen - Aftermath

“We were afraid to admit we were Sunnis,” Lubna told me. “All men stopped going to the mosque to pray because they would have been harassed or killed.” Muhamad’s sister was married to a Shiite man, he told me, and they had many friends and relatives who were Shiites. “It’s the militias of Badr and Sadr,” Lubna told me, “they are ruthless.” The company they worked for was owned by a Sunni man, and it had branches in Baghdad and Basra. In Basra twenty members of the company were kidnapped. The Shiites were released, and thirteen Sunni employees were murdered. In Baghdad the company’s Shiite lawyer was killed by Sunni militiamen, a security guard was kidnapped, and the manager was threatened. The owner belonged to the Omar family, a name that gave them away as Sunni, and his company was known as a “Sunni company.” He fled Basra to Baghdad because of threats, and after more threats he fled to the United Arab Emirates. Muhamad was beaten, and his car was stolen. “Every day we heard of people we knew getting killed,” he told me.

Lubna and Muhamad chose Egypt because the cost of living was cheap and Syria was threatened by the Americans. They came on a three-month tourist visa and rented their apartment, for which they paid three hundred dollars a month. Lubna felt welcomed by the Egyptians, she said, and Muhamad felt at home because the social environment reminded him of Iraq. After they arrived they were joined by Lubna’s mother and her seventeen-year-old sister, Najwa, who attended a private high school. Lubna’s grandfather was dying, so her mother returned to Baghdad to see him, but then she could no longer get permission to return to Cairo. Muhamad heard rumors that Iraqis who had tried to renew their visas at the Mugamaa were deported by Egyptian authorities, so he obtained an asylum-seeker registration card from the UNHCR.

The couple ran out of their savings, and in December 2006 Muhamad opened his Internet cafe. Lubna hoped to work when Rawa was older. “Our standard of living in Iraq was much better,” she told me. In Medinat Nasr they had Shiite neighbors who had been expelled from a Sunni neighborhood in Baghdad. I asked if the sectarian problems had followed them here. “On the contrary,” Muhamad said, “we are happy to see any Iraqi so we can speak our dialect.” Lubna added that “the Iraqis who come here are all tired and don’t want to organize or attract attention.”

Muhamad had to get an Egyptian partner just to open a business. The Egyptian owned 51 percent of the cafe, even though he had not invested anything in it. Muhamad’s friend Haidar helped him out at the cafe. A twenty-three-year-old Shiite pharmacist from Baghdad’s Khadhra district, where Shiites were under attack, Haidar was married to a Sunni woman. After a local supermarket owner and his two brothers were murdered for being Shiite, Haidar began to receive threatening calls. His uncle’s car was stolen and his house burned down, and the walls of the neighborhood were scrawled with notices saying that Shiites’ property was forfeit and could be taken by any Sunni. Haidar’s family sold their house, and the new owner was killed. “All the Shiites in the neighborhood fled,” he told me. Haidar moved to Cairo in September 2006 to arrange a place to live before his wife arrived. But when she applied for the Egyptian visa it was denied, leaving her stranded in Baghdad. Haidar met Muhamad in Cairo. “We get along better here than in Iraq,” he told me. “We feel closer.” Hatred of Shiites was increasing throughout the region, and even in Cairo Haidar did not feel fully comfortable. “On the street and in cabs people ask if I am Sunni or Shiite,” he told me. “They say we are infidels.” One day at the supermarket the grocer heard Haidar’s Iraqi dialect and told him, “Your Shiites are infidels.”

Egypt had stopped issuing visas to Iraqis, although it was widely rumored that Iraqis who paid bribes at the Egyptian embassies in Syria and Jordan could obtain them. Iraqis in Egypt told me that they had paid hundreds of dollars to visa agencies that managed to obtain visas for their relatives. Egypt had absorbed between two and four million Sudanese, and had refugees from thirty other nationalities. It also had a high rate of unemployment. Egyptians and Sudanese could not find work, so additional Iraqis would further burden the state’s weak social services. Between 100,000 and 140,000 Iraqis lived in Egypt before the influx of refugees, but by March 2007 only 5,500 had registered with UNHCR for an asylum seeker’s card because, in the eyes of a UN official, “not every Iraqi in Egypt is a refugee.” Many of the middle-class Iraqis in Egypt were beginning to run out of resources, and it was only then that they turned to the UN.

Egypt’s reasons for no longer letting Iraqis in were twofold. In the post-9 /11 world, concern over terrorism justified almost anything. “Tourism is a major industry, so one incident would cost millions in lost revenue,” said the UN official. In addition, Egyptians were afraid of Shiites, an Iraqi diplomat told me, “because they think they have links to Iran.” Many Egyptians had raised fears of a Shiite wave and of Sunnis converting to Shiism. They also feared making permanent demographic changes to Iraq. “You are taking them from Iraq and implanting them somewhere else, and most of them are Sunnis,” a high-ranking Egyptian diplomat told me. “It disturbs me. It means the whole area will be Shiite.”

Many Iraqi refugees have carried the sectarian bitterness with them. In an apartment complex that resembled American housing projects, only partially occupied and complete, I found a collection of Sunni Iraqis in a courtyard inside, where a few had opened shops. Ghaith, an eighteen-year-old from Amriya, long since cleansed of its Shiites, had owned a supermarket back home and had opened up a small grocery store on the ground floor of the complex in Egypt. He pointed to his twelve-year-old brother playing soccer with other boys and told me that he had been kidnapped in Baghdad and held for one week. Sitting in the grocery store was Dhafer, a round thirty-five-year-old man with a sharp nose and stubble from a few days of neglect. He had the tired look of a defeated man. Originally from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district, he had been threatened by Shiite neighbors whose sons worked with the Iraqi National Guard and Interior Ministry, he said, and given forty-eight hours to leave. “I brought my relatives for protection and weapons and they escorted us out,” he told me. I asked him why he had then left Amriya. “Civil war,” he said. “All of Baghdad, all of Iraq, is a civil war. The guy who goes on television and says it’s not a civil war is mocking the people.” On August 16, 2005, Dhafer came to Cairo with his wife and son. Since then another son had been born. Dhafer and his family regularly watched Al Zawra TV, the Iraqi satellite channel that broadcast resistance operations and was openly pro-Sunni and anti-Shiite. They had recently seen a video of a Sadrist cleric calling on Shiites to kill Sunnis. “I was not surprised,” he told me. “I know the Shiite sect. But my wife was crying.” Dhafer told me that up to twenty of his friends had already been killed in Baghdad. He had not renewed his residency and instead had applied for refugee status at the UNHCR. Although he missed his family, he never wanted to return to Baghdad. His relatives had also warned him not to return, telling him that it was better to starve outside.

Next door was a hair salon owned by a Sunni couple from Baghdad’s Ghazaliya district. It was decorated in pink and red in honor of Valentine’s Day, and there was only a chair for one customer at a time. Its owner, Ghada, had taught herself hairdressing after she arrived in Cairo with her husband, Abu Omar, and their three children. Abu Omar, a former colonel in the Iraqi Army, had retired in 1999. After retiring he had opened a stationery shop in the Nafaq al-Shurta district with a friend. The American military raided their home twice. “They said to me, ‘You look like an American woman,’” Ghada said, laughing with pride. The military asked permission to use their roof for surveillance, and Abu Omar agreed. “Could we have said no?” Ghada asked.