Aftermath

by Nir Rosen

  “First the minorities left Iraq,” a UNHCR official told me, “now we get Sunnis targeted by Shiite militias.” Until February 2006 the majority had been Christians, although Muslims were represented as well, with Sunnis and Shiites equally represented. Starting in March 2006, though, the number of Sunni refugees shot up, far exceeding all other groups; July through September 2006 saw a sharp rise in Sunnis registering. Between January 2005 and the end of February 2007, 58,924 Iraqis registered with UNHCR in Damascus. Forty-two percent of those registered since December 2003 were Sunni, 21 percent were Shiite, and 29 percent were Christian. In January 2007, 3,144 Sunnis and 901 Shiites were registered. In February it was 5,988 Sunnis to 1,570 Shiites. Only the most desperate refugees bothered to register, so the true figures were unknown. Ninety-five percent of those registered with UNHCR were from Baghdad.

  The Shiites were generally single young men, while the rest came as families. For the first two years the Syrians provided free medical care to Iraqis, but they were overwhelmed; in 2005 they ended the practice except for emergencies. Iraqis could attend Syrian public schools provided they were not too crowded, which they often were. Child labor became a problem, since parents were unable to work and children were easier to hide. Children dropped out of school as a result, and Iraqi prostitutes became extremely common. UN screeners reported seeing numerous victims of torture, detention, rape, and kidnapping among newly arrived Iraqis. Most had family members who had been killed, and many were intellectuals.

  “The problems of Iraqis have not come to Syria,” said Jolles, referring to sectarianism. “The [Iraqi] refugee communities don’t integrate, and the government has good control.” But he still had his worries. “They are less manageable and understandable because they are not in camps. One million people are uprooted, and they don’t know what the future has in store for them. It’s normal to have some degree of criminality, violence, and disruption.”

  According to a Western diplomat, the presence of so many Iraqis gave the Syrian government political leverage in Iraq. Nearly every Iraqi political movement was represented in Syria. Historically Syria had accepted Iraqi dissidents such as those from the left wing of the Baath Party, Dawa leaders like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and even Kurdish independence parties. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan was established in a Damascus restaurant. The Syrians were still playing a complex game. They diplomatically recognized the Iraqi government but also housed members of the former regime, security forces, and Baath Party. They invited Shiite leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr and radical Sunnis close to the resistance, such as Harith al-Dhari of the Association of Muslim Scholars. Syria saw the Iraqi civil war through the prism of Lebanon, thinking it could manage the conflict through its contacts; thus the Syrians were monitoring and cultivating everybody. But there were also dangerous contradictions in Syrian policy. Syria is a majority-Sunni country, but its close ally is Shiite Iran—which, in the eyes of Sunnis in Iraq and the region, sponsored the very militias that were persecuting Iraq’s Sunnis, who were often related to Syria’s Sunnis, especially in the border region. “The Syrian government is very capable of managing those issues,” the Western diplomat assured me, but sectarianism was at its peak in the region, and Syria, which was once a major exporter of fighters to Iraq, may face its own blowback.

  “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.”

  Lost Amid the Millions in Cairo

  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.”

  “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 court
yard 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.