Iraqs Forgotten Refugees

When I walked into Samia Kouzah’s dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn’t recognize her daughter as human. Rahma, age twenty months, has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon character’s.

Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahma said she wouldn’t live past one year old. In September, Rahma turns two.Rahma sits on her mother’s lap, enveloped in Samia’s blue and beige veil, and begins to fuss. "She has a fever," Samia explains. "She’s teething."

Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. She shows me her ID. She is technically not an Iraqi. And she is not Jordanian. Her six-year-old son, Mohammed, isn’t able to attend public schools.Her family was part of the mass 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She says Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began. Her husband worked as an electrician in Baghdad. But he’s been deported from Jordan (he, too, lacked legal residency) and is now living in Bethlehem. He’s not working and cannot support the family.

Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan’s third largest city, forty minutes away from Amman. It’s a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants—Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis. (Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, hailed from these poverty-stricken streets. "Zarqawi" literally means "someone from Zarqa.")

Jordan and Syria, not the United States, have felt the brunt of the refugee wave that Bush’s invasion has caused. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria, and the annual cost of accommodating these Iraqi refugees is $1 billion per country. "Because they are not huddled in camps, these refugees do not get the attention and help they deserve from the U.S. and the international community," states a recent IRC report on Iraqi refugees.

Jordan’s government grants legal residency to a very small percentage of the estimated one million Iraqis who have fled there. Wealthy Iraqis can buy residency with a deposit of 100,000 Jordanian dinars ($141,000 U.S.) in the bank. Some middle class professionals are able to get work permits. But many Iraqis are simply overstaying their visas. The Jordanian government has not officially recognized them as refugees. They are considered guests, and life is not easy for them.Samia says she is willing to work but she can’t leave the house due to her daughter’s condition. The family is surviving on assistance from a brother and from groups such as Al Tamkeen, a local project funded by the IRC and implemented by the Near East Foundation.

Project directors from the Near East Foundation and Al Tamkeen, who are visiting Samia with me, ask her if she needs anything. "Only bring my husband back," she responds.The smell of greens simmering in garlic floats through the apartment of Miriam Haddad. A widow with three young sons, Haddad has shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. She’s wearing a navy blue T-shirt with white stripes and jeans and offers us water, juice, and Iraqi cookies.

A wooden diagram of Iraq sits on the shelf next to a statue of Jesus. Haddad, who asked me not to use her real name due to fear, is an Ashuri Christian Iraqi who arrived in Zarqa from Baghdad on November 1, 2004. She had lost her job in the ministry of education, she says, due to discrimination. After the U.S. invasion, things changed at work. She got a new manager who "had a long beard," she recalls. "He said, 'The crusaders are here,’ " and he was referring to U.S. troops.Before the war, her husband was the head of reception at the Sheraton in Baghdad. Tourism tanked so he resigned. Later, he developed stomach cancer. Haddad came to Zarqa after her husband passed away. "Zarqa is cheaper, and that’s why we’re here," she says.

Haddad’s family is one of the quarter of Iraqi refugee households headed by women, according to the United Nations. Her boys, ages fourteen, eleven, and nine, suffer from trauma. They rarely go outside beyond school and are not social with any other kids. Despite psychological treatment in Jordan, the eleven-year-old still pees on himself. In Baghdad, he witnessed a killing on the way to school. The youngest son is very attached to her, Haddad says, "and won’t leave me at all."

Her modestly furnished apartment runs 50 Jordanian dinars ($71 U.S.) a month. She has registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) but lacks legal residency in Jordan, which makes it difficult to find a job. She applied to work at a sewing factory but quit after ten days because she was uncomfortable, she says shyly, hinting at sexual advances from men there. She gets 140 Jordanian dinars a month ($198 U.S.) from nongovernmental organizations, and in-kind assistance, such as school uniforms and supplies, from other groups. Even in Jordan, Haddad says, she faces religious discrimination. The woman in charge at one charity is Shia and reluctant to help a Christian.

She has some relatives in Baghdad but has no desire to go back. Zarqa is so cheap she feels she can’t move anywhere else.She mentions she got her couch from the curb and cleaned it up. "I hesitate to ask for help," she says. Last winter, she received carpets, a heater, and blankets from a local group. Haddad sold the carpets for cash.

Ahmad is a stocky young man with a shaved head and goatee. He was studying business management at the University of Baghdad when the Iraq War began. When I arrive at his apartment in Amman, he is sitting in his living room on a gold brocade couch. He had been watching satellite TV, and a Playstation 2 sits on the rug in front of it. Photos of his family rest on top on the TV, including one of his father as a young man carrying a child on his shoulders.

Ahmad doesn’t want to give his last name out of fear. His family left the Al-Jami’a university neighborhood in Baghdad after receiving death threats shortly after the American tanks rolled into Iraq’s capital. "On Thursday, when the American troops got into Baghdad, some people welcomed them," Ahmad says. "Not all people were happy under Saddam’s regime." Many people thought the Americans would improve the economy and rebuild institutions, "but none of that happened," he adds.In 2004, Ahmad decided to go back to Baghdad to finish his studies. On his way, gangs attacked him, he says, pointing to injuries to his shoulder and head. When he arrived in Baghdad, he went to the hospital and received only a bit of treatment, he says. All the hospitals in Baghdad "are full of wounded people and dead people," he notes. "There were higher priorities."

He lived with some relatives until he finished school at the end of the year. He wanted to pick up his certificate, but his friends told him that some people had come to the university and asked about him. So he got a car and came back to Amman.Ahmad’s father wasn’t so lucky. Before the war, he worked in the foreign ministry. In 2005, he went back to Iraq to see if he could sell one of his three houses. Some people contacted him there and said they were interested in buying the house. But it was a trap, Ahmad says. A gang called his family and said we are the ones who kidnapped your father and we want $100,000 in ransom.

"After negotiations, because we did not have that amount, they went down to $50,000," Ahmad says. His family mortgaged the apartment they owned in Amman, and his mom sold her gold jewelry. They also took money from people they knew to raise the ransom.

Ahmad called the gang back and said we have your money. The gang told him that they already had decapitated him. "If you want the head, you can take it for $5,000," Ahmad recalls the kidnappers saying. "The body has been thrown away somewhere." After an hour, Ahmad called back to make sure their father was dead so the family could go ahead with the funeral. The kidnappers said, no, we didn’t kill him and asked if the money had been secured.After further negotiations, Ahmad wired the money to an office in Syria, he says. The next day, the kidnappers called and said a girl picked up the money in Syria and they would let his father go in an hour. Ahmad called back in an hour but their phone was off. "Psychological warfare," he says. An hour later his father called. He came back to Amman the next day.

Ahmad says his father was hit with the butt of a gun on his shoulders, knees, and back by his captors. He doesn’t know who kidnapped his father. "Every day they would say something different," he says. "They were probably from Mahdi army," referring to the Shia militia headed by Moqtada al-Sadr.In Amman, Ahmad recently became engaged to a fellow Iraqi refugee. He wears a ring on his finger even though he isn’t married yet. It’s difficult for someone his age to be engaged and not working, he says. Plus, he’s the only one in his family left in Amman. His mother sought refuge in Sweden. His sister, who is married to an Iraqi American, is in the United States. His father returned to Baghdad, but is in hiding."Everyone is in another part of the world," Ahmad says.

Like most Iraqi refugees, Ahmad does not have legal residency in Jordan. The UNHCR office in Jordan gave them papers stating that they can’t be sent back to their country by force. "But they are just formalities," Ahmad says. "Nobody cares for them." He showed the papers to the police last month but they said just put the papers aside. They put him in the jail in the police station for not having residency. When he was in custody, no lawyer from UNHCR showed up, he says. "They never answered my phone calls."

If he gets picked up again by the police, he could be deported and end up back in Iraq. He says he’d be slaughtered if he returned. "If I die, I die," he says. "The American administration went into Iraq to bring us democracy. We are living democracy now," he says sarcastically. "If it wasn’t for the Americans, we wouldn’t be in this place."Athra Al-Duleimi, who is thirty-five, has large brown eyes lined with kohl and long black hair that peeks out behind a black veil. She wears jeans under her black cloak and has long, piano player fingers. She lives in a large, sunny apartment with a patio and a satellite dish. Her neighbor’s daughters are hanging out in the kitchen.

While her apartment seems spacious compared to those of other refugees I’ve spoken to, it doesn’t compare to the life she left behind in Baghdad. She comes from a wealthy Sunni family that had many properties.She says they were targeted by Shias after the U.S. invasion. She had a cousin in construction in Baghdad. His neighbors said he was a spy and he was shot in the head in front of her house. Her husband was shot and she was, too, but they both survived. Her cousin did not.

Athra says her husband had a grocery store near a palace taken over by U.S. troops. He sold goods to everyone. People said he was a spy and became a target for Shiite militias.Days after her cousin’s death, she found a threatening letter and four bullets—one each for her, her husband, and two sons—outside her house. So they left everything and came to Jordan in October 2006."Everything is different here," she says. In Baghdad, she used to be social, "but nobody comes around here."

Her son works packaging tobacco for water pipes, for a month or two at a time. Her family in Baghdad used to send money, but three months ago the Iraqi military, along with U.S. troops, attacked their house and stole everything, she says. They now survive on her son’s irregular salary and small monthly stipends from nongovernmental organizations.She starts crying when she begins talking about her brother, Hasan, who she says was killed by Shiite militias. "We took the threats against us seriously," she says. "We didn’t even have a funeral."

Athra’s biggest concern is health care. She has asthma but no insurance. She went to a private hospital because she couldn’t breathe and was nearly denied entry because she didn’t have enough money. She says she also has a tumor on her left breast that should be removed.Her family applied for immigration to the United States, but was denied.(According to the International Rescue Committee, the U.S. government accepted only 1,608 Iraqi refugees in fiscal year 2007.) So she’s staying in Jordan indefinitely.She would like to take a short visit to Baghdad. "I would only go back for one week," she says, "to visit my sick mother."