Because everyone seems to have forgotten, I want to remind you that Iraq has a refugee crisis

We haven't heard much about the Iraqis who have been displaced by the war lately, but that doesn't mean that they all went home and resumed their normal lives as soon as the media stopped talking about them. Not even close.

The fact still remains that five million Iraqis have been displaced as a result of the invasion and occupation of their country, and the chaos that action has wrought. Five million people. That number represents approximately 20% of the prewar population of the country.

Some of the displaced have left neighborhoods and sought refuge with friends or family in other areas. Many with resources have fled the country and are living a day to day existence in Jordan or Syria. The overwhelming crush of refugees has rendered damage to the social fabric of both those nations. Indeed, the only beneficiary of this clusterfuck - besides some well-connected mercenary outfits, of course - seems to be the Syrian sex industry.

Still others, lacking the resources to get out of the country or the savings on which to survive once out of Iraq, (refugees are not allowed to work in the neighboring countries, instead they subsist on dwindling savings and refugee aid) are displaced into tent cities in the desert. Jordan and Syria were forced last fall to close their borders and deny more Iraqi refugees to cross over, but inside Iraq, internal migration has been curtailed as well. Last fall, governates stopped allowing internal migration, but still not a peep has been reported about it in the M$M, or by the warbloggers. If they have covered it, I missed it.


If anyone wants to know what happens when young men are congregated in refugee camps with no hope for anything except endless days of hopelessness, poverty and humiliation; one only need cast ones eyes slightly to the west and look at the turmoil in Palestine and take note of the fact that there is no shortage of young men willing to blow themselves up in pizza parlors to inflict a measure of suffering against those perceived to be an existential enemy. In other words, George Bush and Dick Cheney and the rest of the war-criminal cabal have turned Iraqis into Palestinians...occupied, ruled, subjugated and humiliated by outsiders in their own land.

How the hell can you have peace when one in five people is displaced, and an even higher percentage has experienced sectarian violence at the hands of their neighbors? How the hell can you have peace when once-thriving multi-ethnic neighborhoods have been ghettoized by concrete barriers, and people can only go in and out of their own neighborhoods by clearing checkpoints?

How do you rebuild a society when the professionals who delivered services and worked the levers that made society function have fled the country? When doctors offices are padlocked and hospitals stand abandoned save one or two doctors who simply refuse to bend, and the education system struggles in the face of teachers and professors who have either left the country or stopped teaching for fear of being brutally murdered for doing their jobs?

A couple of years ago, we heard a lot about the "brain drain" that threatened to ability of Iraq to return to stability and functioning as a society. In January 2006, the Washington Post was all over it.

"Professors have been threatened. Doctors have been killed in their clinics. Killing has become common," Fayed said. "Some people believe this is intentional, to try to empty Iraq of its elite."

Kubasi, the former head of Iraq's military medical corps, believes that. In late April, his secretary handed him a letter written in what he called "bad Arabic" giving them all by May 6 -- 10 days -- to leave the country. He showed the letter to authorities, who suggested he had faked it. By May 8, Kubasi was in Jordan.

His three sons and his daughter are all physicians. They could not risk staying, he said.

"Every day, we sit here, 10 or 12 of us, senior professionals, just discussing the situation," Kubasi said from Amman. "It's mental death to sit here. But even my patients say I should not come back. Really, really, I could not pay for a kidnapper's ransom. And in that case, you would be killed."

It frustrates him to watch the medical training system he helped create fall apart. "The circuit of teaching, training and care is being broken. It may not be recovered," he said.

"Our medical schools and doctors are known all over the Arab world. The teaching care was excellent, based on the British system. We were successful under Saddam Hussein to start our own postgraduate studies, including many medical specialties. Now they are ridding the country of all of this."

Well, Mission accomplished.

If the mission was to turn Iraq into Palestine, displace one-in-five Iraqis from their homes, send the professional and middle classes into diaspora and ethnically cleanse and ghettoize the cities, it has been accomplished in trump.

The humanitarian crisis of the ordinary people who have been forced from their homes and trapped behind blast walls lies at the heart of any potential political and security gains in Iraq. Until the humanitarian disaster is dealt with, the rest is just window dressing.

That it is no longer even being discussed tells me that the progenitors and supporters of this clusterfuck are decidedly unserious.

[Crossposted from Blue Girl, Red State & linked at Informed Comment]

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The little told story of Iraqi refugees

As a media junkie, I watch a lot of TV reporting to see what Big Media deems as newsworthy. One of the catastrophic consequences of the Iraq War is the precarious Iraqi refugee situation -- a story that's virtually absent from our tee-vee screens. Instead we hear about Huckabee's "subliminal cross" ad and other vacuous trivia that media spin into Serious News Reporting. The Watchers here have repeatedly written about the plight of Iraqi refugees, raised relevant questions, and reported on the disastrous humanitarian crisis of "George Bush’s vanity war."

What have you seen on the news networks? Nary a peep? Yeah, me neither.

I've previously commented at Political Animal about Iraqis returning from exile in allegedly large numbers. And it's untrue. Too many face perilous conditions to go home. Today's NYTimes reports on the destitution facing a "small fraction" of the millions of Iraqi refugees displaced by the war who have begun to return.

Tens of thousands of returning refugees face similar uncertainties throughout Iraq, where the government’s inability to manage the uneven reverse exodus has left the most vulnerable in an uneasy, potentially explosive limbo.

The government’s widely publicized plan to run free buses from Damascus, Syria, to Baghdad was suspended after just two runs. Thousands of Sunni refugees get no aid because they fear registering with the Shiite-led government. While aid organizations are distributing emergency packets that include utensils, blankets and food, deeper structural issues, like securing neighborhoods, supplying housing and creating jobs, remain unresolved and largely unaddressed.

Imagine arriving home to find your house reduced to rubble. Or if you're lucky and the structure still stands, you discover squatters displaced by the war, ethnic cleansing, and the insurgency now occupy your former abode. What do you do when "the government committee that decides property disputes is charged with hearing only cases that predate the invasion of 2003" and you're hopelessly stranded in a spiral of constantly seeking safety and security?

[Keep reading...]

The backlog has overwhelmed the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

The brewing housing crisis extends to millions who abandoned their homes but stayed in Iraq. In Baghdad alone, more than 300,000 people left one neighborhood for another, as Sunnis fled to the west and Shiites to the east, often moving into recently evacuated houses.

Afraah Kadhom’s family is among the uprooted. She is 36, and usually shrouded in a billowing black abaya, a symbol of mourning. Her father and four brothers were killed two years ago when gunmen broke through the doors to the family’s house in Huriya, a neighborhood in north central Baghdad, and methodically hunted the men down. One of her brother’s sons, Mustafa, cradled his father’s head as the man lay dying. Mustafa, who is 9 now and shy, is the oldest surviving male member of the family. “The man of our house,” Ms. Kadhom said.

The family stayed in Huriya until last December, when armed Shiite militiamen swept through, routing more than 100 Sunni families, including Ms. Kadhom’s. Ms. Kadhom and her relatives fled to Ghazaliya, in western Baghdad, where an imam found them an apartment belonging to a Shiite family that had left for eastern Baghdad.

The government has aid programs that could help Ms. Kadhom, but she views them with deep suspicion. To apply for the food program, for example, she would have to return to Huriya to unregister the family with the local council, but she is desperately afraid of going there.

Iraq’s internally displaced are entitled to 150,000 dinars, or $123, a month from the government. But Ms. Kadhom also worries that the Shiite-dominated government would punish her if she applied. Her pride is also a factor. Ms. Kadhom’s father was a sheik. The family was used to giving alms, not asking for them.

If the apartment’s owners come back, Ms. Kadhom’s family will have nowhere to go. Three weeks after her family fled, its house was bombed and the rubble bulldozed away.

“The Shiites who moved into the homes near our property in Huriya, they will kill us if we go back,” she said.

Such stories are common among the homeless and displaced of Iraq's population. Dr. Said Hakki, the director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society, said, “The Iraqi government is aware of it and so is General Petraeus’s office." But the American military has refused "to get involved in property disputes, and the Iraqi government appears to be ignoring calls from its own ranks to step up the appeals process."

Hamdiya A. Najaf, a displacement and migration ministry official, painted a picture of desperation and frustration in pleading for help. Only Prime Minister al-Maliki can solve the mounting dilemma but he hasn't responded. Or won't.

Dhia’a al-Dien, 42, an engineer, leads the local council in the area of Haifa Street where Ms. Hashim and her family now live. Haifa Street used to be one of the most turbulent neighborhoods in Baghdad, and its middle class fled as kidnappings and mob-style street killings soared.

When squatters descended on some apartments, Mr. Dien said he felt helpless. “They were displaced from other neighborhoods. I felt pity for some of them. Others had weapons, the invaders. There was such chaos.”

Mr. Dien said he had been able to negotiate the return process for the handful of owners who have reclaimed their buildings. Some of the squatters left; others agreed to pay rent. But hundreds of the apartments’ owners have yet to return, and he fears getting stuck in the middle when they do.

“There’s no one helping us negotiate the return,” he said, shaking his head. “The Americans are telling us that we’ve got to negotiate between each other, because it’s not their business. But the Iraqi government said it’s not their business either.”

The unprecedented mayhem set into motion by the U.S. invasion continues to ravage Iraq at a scale five times more devastating than Hurricane Katrina. Maybe worse as anguish, poverty, the lack of basic shelter and safety breeds fear, resentment, potential new terrorists, and possibly future violence in Iraq.

While we witness reports about the seemingly quelled insurgency, notice also the little told story of the escalating humanitarian crisis of Iraq's refugees. It's quite chilling that a recent study showed that all Iraqi groups blame the U.S. invasion for their woes.

Few mentioned Saddam Hussein as a cause of their problems, which the report described as an important finding implying that "the current strife in Iraq seems to have totally eclipsed any agonies or grievances many Iraqis would have incurred from the past regime, which lasted for nearly four decades -- as opposed to the current conflict, which has lasted for five years."

Heckuva job, George.

And heckuva job, Big Media. Under-reporting the facts about the Iraqi refugee crisis won't make the situation disappear. Not for a long, long time.

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"Worse than 1948"

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reports that Iraqis fleeing the war raging around them are running out of options as provinces within the country are refusing to allow internally displaced refugees entry, citing their lack of resources to adequately accommodate the refugees as a reason. With no end in sight to the turmoil and displacement, Andrew Harper, the head of the UNHCR Iraq Support Unit warned that Iraq was becoming “a pressure cooker.”

Now, nearing five years of warfare and invasion, the humanitarian crisis is coming to a head. Nearly 5 million people, in a population of 27 million, have fled the violence of George Bush’s vanity war.

Nearly 18% of the country has fled into diaspora


· Internally Displpaced.........1,225,000
· Syria..................................1,400,000
· Jordan..................................750,000
· Gulf states.............................200,000
· Egypt.................................... 100,000
· Iran.........................................54,000
· Lebanon..................................40,000
· Turkey.....................................10,000

"We are seeing an increasing number of governorates closing their borders or restricting entry to new arrivals," Mr. Harper said in an interview with the BBC. “And so we have a pressure cooker building up inside Iraq - there is no imminent end to the displacement." Governors from as many as 11 of 18 Iraqi provinces have been blocking internally displaced persons (IDPs) entry to their governed territory. If they do get in, they are routinely denied food and education. The local Iraqi authorities are simply overwhelmed and lack the resources to cope with the problems unleashed by the folly and hubris of the little idiot.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult for internally displaced Iraqis (at 2.25 million, there are as many IDPs as there are those who have been lucky enough to flee beyond the borders of Iraq). The possibility for fleeing Iraqis to find food, security and respite from war is increasingly more rare; and the few remaining areas where they can find refuge are intense and over populated.

The humanitarian crisis unfolding in Iraq is the most profound challenge facing the UNHCR and the international community. And a hundred thousand data points per month are added to the aggregate statistics.

The security situation is so dire in some areas that local aid workers have reported they are unable to reach thousands of families, including displaced refugees, due to security considerations.

Mr. Harper voices these concerns at a time when Iraq’s neighboring states have closed their borders to Iraqi refugees, claiming they are simply overwhelmed by the number of refugees they have already accepted, and they can no longer cope with the strain on their limited resources.

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It is long past the time for sobering assessments

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a cofounder of the House Out of Iraq Caucus, went on one of those dog-and-pony juggernauts to Iraq over the August recess. The outspoken anti-war liberal pledged to "listen and learn," and keep her own opinions to herself while there.

That proved a challenge at times. Like when Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih told her "There's not going to be political reconciliation by this September; there's not going to be political reconciliation by next September." Or when General Petraeus told her that for a stable Iraq to emerge, it would require another decade of occupation.

But the military presentations left her stunned. Schakowsky said she jotted down Petraeus's words in a small white notebook she had brought along to record her impressions. Her neat, looping handwriting filled page after page, and she flipped through to find the Petraeus section. " 'We will be in Iraq in some way for nine to 10 years,' " Schakowsky read carefully. She had added her own translation: "Keep the train running for a few months, and then stretch it out. Just enough progress to justify more time."

"I felt that was a stretch and really part of a PR strategy -- just like the PR strategy that initially led up to the war in the first place," Schakowsky said. Petraeus, she said, "acknowledged that if the policymakers decide that we need to withdraw, that, you know, that's what he would have to do. But he felt that in order to win, we'd have to be there nine or 10 years."

Schakowsky got an advance screening of the sales pitch that will be hard-peddled in about three weeks time when Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus come to Washington to present the White House-written report on *progress* in Iraq.

Of course, by any metric you choose, the troop buildup is a failure. The express purpose of the exercise in futility and human sacrifice was to give the Iraqi government "breathing space" to achieve political progress. Instead, the government went ahead and stepped up it's disintegration, and calls for Maliki to be replaced are practically commonplace.

The humanitarian crisis is staggering. The number of internally displaced refugees, Iraqis forced from their homes but lacking the resources to flee the war-torn nation, is soaring. Syria and Jordan are overwhelmed. The only beneficiary of the refugee crisis is the Syrian sex trade.

Speaking of the humanitarian crisis created by aWol's vanity war, Petraeus was ready with the spin. "If you don't like the humanitarian crisis, the refugees and the internally displaced people, you can't draw down. If you are concerned about these people, the humanitarian crisis, you should be for our staying here." Schakowsky did not respond to Petraeus; instead she let it pass. "I was not arguing," she said. "I wanted to see what his take was."

Of course he is going to say that. But it's bullshit. The fact is, if the US were out of the way, the neighboring states that are directly affected by the refugees that strain their housing supply, schools and healthcare systems could be involved in helping what is left of Iraq achieve something resembling stability. But seriously - why the hell would Syria get involved when the troublemaker on the block refuses to talk to them, and has even made hostile threatening gestures in their direction?

Why in the name of all that is sacred and holy would we even consider a decade-long occupation of a hostile land when even those who support it admit that the solution is going to be political, not military? It is not at all like Germany, Japan or Korea. We are not occupiers in those nations, we are allies, and we are there at the invitation of the functioning, elected governments of those nations, and the citizens of those nations aren't trying to kill our G.I.'s.

It is time to bring on the diplomats. I don't care if it takes six months to decide on the style of chairs that will surround the peace table. Start fucking talking because this blowing shit up and having our Soldiers and Marines treating the residents of neighborhoods like common criminals is not cutting it, and can not be a successful strategy.

It is long past time to start dealing with reality, because reality certainly has no qualms or reservations about dealing with the young men and women who are thrown into the mix.

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The ICRC explains it all

The International Committee of the Red Cross released a report on the humanitarian situation in Iraq yesterday.

Eight of the most heartbreakingly depressing pages I have ever endured - and I read the entire Lancet study. It isn’t even that it tells us anything we didn’t already know. It’s that it puts it all in a common box and stamps it with an unimpeachable seal of damning veracity. You doubt the findings of the ICRC like you doubt the witness account of a stationwagon full of nuns.

So what is confirmed by the report? (Besides pretty much everything, I mean.)

That virtually every Iraqi has been adversely affected by the violence that has gripped the country. This violence has ratcheted up in the wake of the Sammara mosque bombing in February 2006. Civilians comprise the bulk of the victims and the poor security conditions have disrupted the livelihoods, and the live, of millions of Iraqis.

Dozens die daily, and scores more are wounded as seemingly random bombings and sniper attacks in marketplaces, targeted abductions, sectarian attacks, assassinations and murders, and all form of violence sweep the country. Then there are the victims caught in the crossfire of warring factions.

Approximately two million Iraqi’s have been internally displaced, scattered throughout the countryside and taking shelter with friends and relatives who are ill equipped to take in those who have fled, but do anyway. Those who have no one to take shelter with, and who lack the resources to flee the country make up a growing population of squatters who move into abandoned buildings and the homes abandoned by those who have fled.

Food shortages are becoming more prevalent. Hunger is on the increase and the incidence of malnutrition among the population has spiked upward. Infrastructure is in shambles, and the lack of potable water is nearly at crisis levels in some areas. Untreated sewage and the lack of fresh water is a bellwether for a coming epidemic of communicable disease that, if it were to happen, could be the straw the breaks the camels back, so to speak, and just finishes off the remaining vestiges of a former near-first-world society.

As violence has increased steadily, the healthcare system has been stretched to the limit. Mass casualties occur daily. Sick and injured Iraqis avoid seeking healthcare because the facilities, those who utilize them and the professional medical staff are often targets of violence designed to spread terror. Medical supplies are a precious commodity, especially in a lawless state and a bandit culture. A hospital director in Baghdad told the ICRC that poor security conditions were preventing staff from providing medical services. Checkpoints and roadblocks keep doctors and patients from reaching one another in time

Fully half of the nation’s healthcare providers have fled the country in the wake of kidnappings and murders of their colleagues. Those who remain and are still practicing are the bravest patriots in Iraq, without a doubt. I’m don’t think I am worthy of calling them my professional colleagues. I have never sacrificed like that to work a trauma, and I have never dealt with a mass casualty that wasn’t a drill.

The failure to observe the sanctity of medical personnel in this conflict is especially heinous and troubling. Attacking the helping professionals belies a pathological and depraved desire to rend the very fabric of society itself to tatters.

It’s a hell of a mess that they made, isn’t it? Sucked the ‘civil’ right out of the cradle of civilization, they did.

Heckuva job…

[Cross posted to Blue Girl, Red State]

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