When Iraqis flee the war in their homeland, where do they go?  Fully seven different nations share a border with Iraq: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.  All but the latter (which made it clear from the get-go that it wouldn’t welcome refugees) are playing host, with varying degrees of reluctance, to Iraqi asylum seekers.   Here’s a nice visual overview of the situation:

Needless to say, these numbers have a large margin of error.  It’s easy to under-count refugees, for two reasons.  The first has to do with politics.   Here in Jordan, for instance, the official figure is 500,000 and not a soul more.  Why?  Because the Jordanian government fears that publicizing a larger number will encourage more Iraqis to flock here, taxing the already overburdened national infrastructure and creating a kind of second Palestinian refugee situation.  (The official number is enforced, too: if you’re an NGO that wants to continue assisting Iraqis in Jordan, you had best subscribe to the view that there are only half a million of them.)

The second reason is more obvious: you try getting a precise head count on a population that is always in flux and often in fear.   If I’m doing my math right, the above map places the total number of refugees at 2,454,000, while many people now seem to put the figure closer to 2.2. million.  In other words, the numbers on the map are in the right ballpark, but only if you accept that the ballpark is pretty big.

What this map doesn’t show, though, is the complexity of factors that determine why individual Iraqis go where they do.  Over and over when you speak with refugees, they tell you that, before the war, Sunni, Shiite and Christian Iraqis lived together in harmony.  (Two days ago, one man swore to me on his Qur’an that he’d never even known there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims until the war.)  However much those remarks are colored by nostalgia and historical amnesia, it’s unquestionably true that pre-war Iraq was not riven by the fierce sectarian clashes that divide it today.

When Iraqis fled, though, they faced complicated calculations about where to go.  Some of these questions were basic: what country could they get to safely?  What forms of transportation were available to them?  Where did they have friends and family?  What could they afford?  Which nations had the laxest border requirements, the least expensive visas, the most lenient (or bribe-friendly) authorities?

But questions about cultural identity came into play, too — precisely the kind of questions that hadn’t mattered as much in pre-war Iraq.  For instance: who goes to Lebanon?  Well, for one, Iraqi Christians, who can benefit from its large and established Christian population.  For another, Iraqi Shiites, who head to the south of the country, where the charity arm of Hezbollah provides assistance to its sectarian brethern.  Who goes to Jordan?  First off, the wealthy: Amman ain’t cheap even for Westerners.  Second, the secular: although far more conservative than Lebanon, Jordan is also not an Islamist state, and it’s a comfortable place for non-religious Iraqis to live.

And so it goes on down the list.  In searching for a new homeland — or at least a temporary refuge — Iraqis must make complicated choices based in no small part on the same kind of divisions that have lately torn their country to pieces.  Those choices aren’t inherently dangerous (I’ve yet to hear a credible report of sectarian enmity and violence spilling over from the Iraq war into the refugee community), yet it’s impossible to feel that they aren’t, at the very least, invidious.  And they are a sad fate for a people that seem to be mourning, among their many other losses, the disappearance of a diverse communal life.

Tags: Cost of War, Iraq, Iraqi Refugees, Jordan, Lebanon, Refugee Story, Syria

This entry was posted on Friday, October 9th, 2009 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.