Yesterday I wrote about where Iraqis go when they leave their homeland.  But just as interesting is the question of where they don’t go.  One answer is: back to Iraq.

For instance, check out this map. It’s a visual breakdown of how many refugees returned to the nation’s various provinces in the first nine months of 2008.   In two provinces, Dyiala and Baghdad, the numbers are significant: some 41,000 and 84,000 returnees, respectively.  (As with yesterday’s figures, of course, these have a fairly drastic margin of error.  In particular, the numbers are probably inflated by the fact that many people who return do so only temporarily — either to bring family members, money, or property back out with them again, or because they quickly realize that the situation remains unsafe and leave again.)  Elsewhere, though, they are unimpressive: 740 in Anbar; 1030 in Kirkus; 1370 in Basrah.  Remember, those are nine-month totals.  When you consider that 250 Iraqi refugees still cross the border into Lebanon every month — and that’s to say nothing of Syria, a more popular destination by an entire order of magnitude — these return figures start to seem vanishingly small.

The stories I’m hearing from refugees suggest that those numbers aren’t likely to swell in the near future.  To be sure, some people express a longing for their country and a sense of loss, displacement, and deep homesickness in their new lives beyond its borders.  And today, for the first time, someone suggested to me that Iraq needs its people to go back not merely to achieve peace but to restore the nation to its historic role as one of the truly great cultural and intellectual centers of the world.

Overall, though, surprisingly few of the people I’ve talked to have expressed a desire to return to Iraq, even in the fantasy scenario where a full and durable peace has been achieved.  Maybe, as I suggested in an earlier post, they simply can’t bear the thought of returning to the scene of so much trauma and loss.  But maybe, for them, fantasy scenarios are simply too far beyond the point.  Put differently, maybe these refugees are just realists, basing their plans for the future on their knowledge of what’s really going on in Iraq — in high contrast to the grandiose American dreams, untethered to the facts on the ground, that got us into this mess in the first place.

Tags: Cost of War, Iraq, Iraqi Refugees, Refugee Story

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. 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.