The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  “She is Kurdish—are most Kurdish people Christian?” I wondered.

  “No, most Kurds are Muslims,” Mark acknowledged.

  “Yeah, I think she might be Muslim,” I conceded.

  I sensed that Mark was troubled by my answer. He and I did not see things the same way on a variety of subjects, but his basic goodness to Ebtisam and her family impressed me. When I looked at literature about New Life, I saw that Mark was living out loud what the church urged its members to do: “step out of our white, Anglo comfort zone and take intentional steps to become a multi-ethnic church that reflects the ethnic and socio-economic diversity of our city.” Mark’s service rendered Ebtisam less alone than she would have been otherwise. She could call Mark at any time of day, and he would patiently explain all the things she did not understand about the United States.

  For some time, I remained confused by Jakleen’s choice to wear a hijab. She later explained that she considered herself a Muslim, even though her mother preferred to attend Christian services. Only after spending a lot more time with Ebtisam and her daughters did I come to understand that in the Middle East, it was common for women of different religious persuasions to wear veils of various types, and in fact, it had been a Christian priest in Syria who had first urged Ebtisam’s daughters to adopt the hijab. When I attended services at New Life with Ebtisam, I saw several women wearing scarves over their hair. That Sunday, a particularly fervent parishioner spoke at length about his profound joy in converting a Kurdish friend who had been a practicing Muslim. The gist of the conversion story was that the man had been “saved” from an afterlife in hell by adopting Christianity. Ebtisam did not spend her free time trying to convert those of other faiths, and the evangelical nature of the church ran counter to her idea of respecting both Christianity and Islam.

  At the same time, New Life provided her with Arabic-speaking adults with whom she could socialize, as well as material support in the form of donated household goods. The services also lifted her up spiritually. That day, the congregation did a close reading of Psalm 84—Mark turned around and shared with me an English-language psalm book that he carried everywhere (it was cup-shaped from living in his back pocket) so that I could follow along, because all the Bibles in that particular room were in Arabic. I could feel Ebtisam’s body relax in the pew beside me as the speaker went over the psalm. The preacher said that a person may undergo an especially difficult journey, and travel through a vale of hard times, but ahead there lies a safe dwelling place: “Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself.”

  * * *

  In 2003, when the Iraq War began, Ebtisam and Fadi were living in Karrada, an area of Baghdad where Muslims and Christians lived peacefully side by side. The couple hoped to raise their children in a way that would demonstrate that the two faiths could coexist. Fadi worked as a painter and an electrician. He sided with the United States when it invaded Iraq, and after American troops captured Baghdad, he signed up to work with the U.S. military, according to Ebtisam. He was sent to Kuwait for three months of training. After he learned how to become a bodyguard, he began a new job protecting important members of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the interim government of Iraq established by the United States and its allies.

  At the outset of the war, the Bush administration assumed the conflict would end quickly. After establishing control of Baghdad in the spring of 2003, the U.S. military and allied forces rapidly took a series of other major cities, including Kirkuk and Tikrit. When Ebtisam’s youngest daughter, Lulu, was born in 2004, it seemed as though most of the major skirmishes might be over. As the United States attempted to turn power over to the newly installed leaders of the provisional government, however, conditions in Iraq rapidly deteriorated. Rifts opened up between Sunni and Shia Muslims, between Arabic speakers and Kurdish speakers, and between supporters and opponents of the United States. Even as the Bush administration attempted to throw its weight behind a series of newly installed leaders, Iraqi society fractured along sectarian lines. Civil war followed.

  The Coalition Provisional Authority worked to hold democratic elections at the parliamentary level and then at the general level, culminating in the establishment of a new government in 2006. At the same time, however, violence escalated dramatically. During 2004 and 2005, the two years following the invasion, twenty-five thousand Iraqi civilians were killed; half of those deaths occurred in Baghdad. Another twenty-six thousand civilians died in 2006. Lists of the dead (such as the meticulous database compiled by Iraq Body Count) cite air strikes, improvised explosive devices, suicide bombings, and assassination-style gun executions.

  Amid this escalating violence, civil servants at all levels of the government required bodyguards to ensure their personal security. Fadi worked as a bodyguard for a judge in the Iraqi court system, Mahdi Abu Maali, who presided over tribunals that tried to reimpose order on the rapidly worsening state of Iraqi society. The idea was to combat lawlessness by providing accountability, but the judge himself quickly became a target. Over a period of two months, several bodyguards who worked for the judge were assassinated, and then a failed attempt was made on the judge’s own life. Fadi received a written threat that he might be killed next.

  On May 15, 2005, the judge and his son, Hani, were driving outside the predominantly Sunni town of Latifiya, one of the most dangerous places for the U.S. forces and their allies. Both were assassinated. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had paid a surprise visit to Iraq on that very day, seeking to assure the new leaders that U.S. troops would remain in place until the government could, in her words, “defend itself.” During the twenty-four hours that Rice remained in Iraq, two dozen bodies were discovered, and a car bomb almost killed a provincial governor. Despite Rice’s attempt to deliver the opposite message, the single day’s grim headlines confirmed what everyone there already knew: The Bush team’s attempt to establish a stable regime was failing badly.

  Fadi started chain-smoking and drinking heavily. He kept a gun accessible at all times and constantly watched for cars that might be shadowing him. One evening when the family was at home eating dinner, there was a series of rapid knocks on the front door. Instantly alarmed, Fadi asked if Ebtisam was expecting anyone. She said no. Fadi ran for his gun and told Ebtisam to take the children and go.

  The apartment had a back door that opened onto a flight of stairs leading down to an alley—that was where Ebtisam usually shook out the rugs. Wearing only bedroom slippers on her feet, she picked up Lulu, almost two years old, and hustled the older children, five and six, out the back door. Jakleen gingerly descended the stairs, and Ebtisam, afraid of what lay behind them, urged her to move more quickly. Jakleen let go of the railing and tried to run but lost her balance and tumbled to the bottom, breaking one of her legs so badly that the thigh bone protruded.

  Ebtisam picked up Jakleen and ran down the street carrying two children. She could hear gunfire and feared her husband was being murdered. With tears streaming down her face, and the children crying, too, Ebtisam looked for an Iraqi police officer who sometimes patrolled the area, but he was nowhere to be seen. A taxi drove past, and Ebtisam herded her daughters into the cab. When she reached this point in her story, Ebtisam began beating her chest and rocking back and forth, and wailing loudly, to show us what she had been doing in the vehicle that day, ten years earlier—lamenting the possibility of her husband’s death. Alarmed, the taxi driver dropped the girls and their mother off at the hospital and sped away.

  Ebtisam called her brother-in-law, who arrived at the hospital to find Jakleen screaming, her lips blue from pain, while Mariam was crying and saying repeatedly, “My dad! My dad!” Ebtisam tried to explain, but she was shaking and semihysterical. Doctors fixed the bone that was protruding, but said that Jakleen would have to return later so that an orthopedic surgeon could insert a titanium rod. Afraid to retreat to their own apartment, Ebtisam and the girls slept at her brother-in-law’s home that night.


  Fadi found them there at two o’clock in the morning. He had exchanged fire with his assailants, barricaded the front door, and ran out the back himself. He zigzagged down the darkened streets, then caught a taxi to a part of town where nobody would expect to find him. He took shelter in a cafeteria, where he drank countless cups of tea. Once he believed it was so late that nobody would see him arrive, he set out for his brother’s house.

  After the attack, Fadi spoke with friends who worked for the U.S. military, and all of them told him the same thing: U.S. troops could not give the family round-the-clock protection. Baghdad was probably no longer a safe place for them to live. If they fled to another country, however, they could apply for refugee status.

  * * *

  Before the Syrian refugee crisis began, there was a much less publicized Iraqi refugee crisis, which was the origin of the region’s destabilization. The United Nations defines a refugee as a person who is living outside his or her country of nationality, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted.” The official list of reasons a person can fear persecution (according to Article 1 of the 1951 UN Convention as modified by the 1967 Protocol) include belonging to a tyrannized race, religion, or nationality, being a member of an ostracized social group, or holding undesirable political opinions. After the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq resulted in “an eruption of criminality and sectarian violence,” in the words of a report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, “one of the principal manifestations of Iraq’s protracted crisis has been the exodus of its citizens, primarily to neighbouring and nearby countries, but also to more distant parts of the world.”

  The scale of the exodus from Iraq swelled in 2006, after the bombing of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, which unleashed a particularly severe response. As it happened, that incident coincided roughly with Fadi and Ebtisam’s departure from Baghdad. The events that caused them to leave were the same as those of many Iraqi refugees. In a survey funded by the UNHCR, based on interviews of 3,553 people who fled from Iraq to other Middle Eastern countries, 57 percent had received a direct threat, such as the evening visit by armed assailants to Fadi and Ebtisam’s apartment.

  Most Iraqi refugees sought safety as close as possible to their homeland. As of April 2007, more than 1.2 million Iraqi refugees had moved to Syria, with another 750,000 moving to Jordan, and 500,000 scattered across other parts of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey. Dealing with refugees from Iraq presented the United Nations with a novel set of issues. All of the organization’s prior experience had been with displaced people who were willing to settle in camps. In this case, however, almost all the Iraqi refugees had left large urban centers and they generally preferred to relocate to other cities in the region, intermingling with regular citizens in Aleppo, Damascus, Amann, and Beirut. They generally lacked legal status, however, meaning they were asylum seekers who had not been welcomed officially by their host countries. Many legal residents viewed the new arrivals as intruders. Refugee experts at the UN were frankly bewildered about how to contain the situation. They admitted, “[T]he organization had not planned for this scenario and was unfamiliar with the challenge. . . . The situation remains a fragile one.”

  For the first time, the UNHCR found itself dealing with a largely middle-class refugee population, displaced into middle-income countries. The refugees themselves had higher expectations for their standard of living and they were living in cities where rents were pricier and food more expensive than anything the organization had dealt with previously. Reflecting the scale of the catastrophe, the UNHCR’s budget for refugees from Iraq would balloon from $40 million in 2005 to $271 million by 2008. When the Iraqi influx was at its peak, the UNHCR was registering three thousand people per day.

  At the same time, the economy of the Middle East began to contract, as economic migrants were returning home in large numbers from the Gulf States, depriving their home countries of remittances and flooding local job markets. In Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, many people blamed the incoming refugees for their own economic hardship and were “hostile to their presence,” in the words of the UNHCR report. The Iraqi refugee crisis had turned into a full-blown disaster—one that would help spark the subsequent Syrian refugee crisis—even though the majority of the world’s developed countries were not yet paying a great deal of attention. The Iraqi refugee crisis alone looked unresolvable to the UNHCR. “The majority of Iraqis do not have any immediate prospect of finding a solution to their plight,” wrote the authors of the report. “Most of them consider that the current conditions in Iraq prevent them from repatriating. . . . Only a limited number of the refugees can expect to be accepted for resettlement, and yet those who remain in the three countries of asylum have almost no prospect of local integration or gaining secure residency rights, both of which have been effectively ruled out by the authorities.”

  The biggest problem for the Iraqis seeking asylum in neighboring countries was their inability to find legitimate jobs, due to lack of documents. As the UNHCR report said, “The vast majority of Iraqi refugees do not have access to the formal labor market . . . yet they find themselves living in the capital cities of middle-income countries, where they are obliged to rent accommodation and meet the cost of other essential items, such as food, clothing, and transport.” By registering with the UNHCR, the displaced Iraqis were hoping to resolve this dilemma, acquiring legal status through the act of resettlement.

  * * *

  To qualify for refugee status with the United Nations, a person must have left his or her original country under duress and relocated elsewhere. Ebtisam and Fadi could not submit an application from within Iraq; maybe they should go to Jordan or Egypt, Fadi’s friends advised. Because Fadi had been employed by the U.S. military, and because his life had been threatened, he would have a good case—he might even be granted permission to live in the United States. The family could not leave Iraq right away, however, because Jakleen’s leg required several operations, everybody in the family had to get passports, and they had to sell their apartment. It took months to prepare for their departure.

  Then came an extended period of wandering around the Middle East. In Amman, Jordan, the family did not even make it out of the airport. Although Fadi and Ebtisam had paid for five airplane tickets and were carrying heavy suitcases bulging with all of their belongings, immigration officials turned them away. Jordan had already taken in more than half a million Iraqi refugees—a huge influx given that the country’s total population numbered six million—and feelings toward Iraqis had soured after Iraqi suicide bombers attacked three hotels in Amman.

  Next they flew to Cairo, where they were able to obtain a renewable residence permit with a duration of six months. They found a decent place to live in a suburb of Cairo called Nasr City, but then they foundered economically. Egypt was fast becoming a more popular destination for Iraqi refugees, and the numbers of displaced Iraqis living there had ballooned from about 1,000 to 150,000 in the three years since the Iraq War had begun. Fadi and Ebtisam registered as refugees with the United Nations, but found work permits impossible to come by and jobs almost as scarce.

  Fadi could not obtain a formal position of any kind in Egypt. As he and Ebtisam waited to hear whether another country might accept them for relocation, their savings dwindled. In a desperate move, Fadi invested most of the family’s money in a start-up business venture dreamt up by an acquaintance. When it failed (Ebtisam believes they were swindled), they lost everything they had earned from the sale of their apartment in Baghdad. Theirs was a common story, representative of what many displaced Iraqis were encountering as they surged into other parts of the Middle East. In the UNHCR survey, 37 percent of the respondents said their main source of income was their savings, and one-third said they expected their funds to last less than three months.

  After they wiped out their financial reserves, the family decided to move to Damascus, Syria. It was Decembe
r 2006, and Saddam Hussein had recently been captured by the American forces. Maybe the level of violence in Iraq would subside, Ebtisam hoped; perhaps her family could soon return to Baghdad. They just needed somewhere to stay until Iraq grew more stable, or until the United Nations found them a new home. Given that Jordan and Egypt had proved inhospitable, Syria seemed like the best place to seek refuge.

  Iraqis had been pouring into Syria, as the two countries shared a border and were strongly aligned culturally. Because Syria had admitted more than one million Iraqi refugees—causing intense domestic turmoil—the United Nations announced that it would open a new office in Damascus, specifically to handle uprooted Iraqis. They would be given a particular certificate, different from non-Iraqi refugees. Maybe they would have better luck if they applied for the certificate available in Syria, Ebtisam and Fadi thought.

  That December, the family found a one-bedroom apartment in Jaramana, a suburb of Damascus highly popular with refugees. It had a large population of Christian residents living alongside those of other faiths, and many Iraqi families whose stories were similar to theirs had settled there. In the years that followed, as violence in Iraq worsened, more and more Iraqis would arrive. As the number of roadside bombs, suicide bombers, rocket-propelled grenades, and shootings taking place in Iraq reached new peaks, Fadi and Ebtisam welcomed a continual stream of new arrivals from their homeland, which was falling apart as a country. The neighborhood of Jaramana more than doubled in size, swelling from 100,000 residents to over 250,000.

  Among the new arrivals was Fadi’s brother, who moved in along with his wife and their children. Then Fadi’s brother’s wife’s sister and her children joined the household. At one point, fourteen people crowded into the one-bedroom apartment. As the economy shrank and refugees glutted the job market, competition for work grew ferocious. Fadi found black market employment installing satellite dishes and earned just enough to cover the rent, along with help from his brother. There was nothing extra for luxuries. Meanwhile, food and fuel prices increased, tightening the economic vise.