Hi Everyone,

We’ve cut together a short highlight video from the trip, please take a look and feel free to pass it along. A longer version will be posted later this week. And of course the video on the crisis is still to come, look for that in the spring.

All the best,

IVAP Team

The IVAP team journeyed from Damascus, Syria, south to the ancient city of Bosra. The team was accompanied by a group of young adults from the Iraqi Student Project.

IPS is a grass roots effort to help young Iraqi’s acquire an education in US colleges and universities. Amid the ancient ruins, we spoke with several students about their hopes and dreams.

So what is the answer? I have no idea. But I think it begins with America cleaning up its mess. We have a responsibility to these people. At present, most of the Iraqis don’t blame American people, just the American government. But that may soon change, if we don’t. If we don’t start making this a national priority, I fear for a generation of Iraqis growing up uneducated, unsupported and equating the U.S. with all their hardship. Amends needs to be paid.

Inside of cinder block home.

Yesterday, we met with a family– 5 children and 5 adults living in 2 cinder block boxes in the middle of a junkyard. For me, it was the worst conditions we have seen in our 3 weeks in the Middle East. I didn’t know what to do. It was nauseating to know these people used to have a home and a life. Now they barely live. Now their children play with cement pieces and old abandoned, broken toys. These are innocent children hit by crossfire. They had little water and less food and hope running on empty. We were 8 people that day. They offered us a meal. They have nothing to eat and they offered us a meal.

It is these people I cannot forget. These people who did nothing wrong, yet…yet…yet…

What do I make of all this? Hopefully a play. And some change. The Iraqi refugees could really use some of that: change. And hope.

In some respects, then, Adab came to Syria for less than typical reasons.  In other ways, though, her story was all too familiar.  Halfway through high school, for instance, she left Baghdad (and her family) and went to Basra to finish studying there.  Why?  Because during her sophomore year, a militia and the U.S. Army got into a massive gunfight at her school.  Militia violence at schools is tragically typical in Iraq, but this particular incident was so bad that the school actually shut down.  (In a sense, Adab was lucky, not only because she survived the gunfight but also because she was able to continue her education.  Many Iraqi kids I talked to had stayed home from school — had, indeed, barely left their homes — for months or years.)

Adab was fifteen when the gunfight happened.  By then, she told me, she had already come to school more than once to find decapitated bodies on the doorstep.  (After the first time her then-six-year-old sister witnessed that, Adab told me, she didn’t speak for a week.)  On other days, the entrance was splattered with — here she had to ask me for help with the word in English — innards.

I supplied the word, but who can really translate the experience?   This is the question I’ve been grappling with throughout my time in the Middle East.  In fact, Adab and I talked about it, too, because it turns out that she wants to become a journalist as well.  As she put it, she wants to spend her life covering important issues and bringing the truth about them to the world.

“The truth” and “the world” are the kinds of concepts you look at a bit skeptically after a decade or so as a practicing journalist.  As often as not, both are way too complicated and multifaceted to be reduced to that single unitary “the.”  Still, Adab’s sentiment was an honorable one, and in one form or another, it is the underpinning of conscientious journalism.  The reality about the Iraqi refugee crisis is that no one but Iraqis will experience it firsthand, and precious few people will experience it even secondhand, as I have.  Much as I often want to, none of us can bring the world to the truth — meaning, bodily drag every person on earth over for two or twenty or two million cups of tea with the two million Iraqi refugees.  As a result, those of us who have had the privilege of meeting some of these people bear the responsibility of bringing a part of their reality back home with us (since we also have the privilege, as they do not, of going home).  As the old and rather apt saying goes: if Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must go to Mohammed.

Women and men wait outside the UNHCR registration center for news of resettlement. It is here that the sheer magnitude of this problem can be viscerally felt. To date, 215,000 Iraqis are registered with UNHCR in Syria. It's estimated that as many as 1.2 million Iraqi refugees are living in Syria.

If T = the tragedy of one person’s experience

and N = the number of people affected

Then T x N = … ?

You tell me.  When it comes to situations of mass misery, we have a story versus scope problem: we can be moved by individual people’s sufferings, and we can be stunned by statistics, but we cannot sum them up, in either sense of the phrase.

Iraqis waiting at UNHCR to register, receive assistance or check on the status of their application.

This reality hit home for me again here in Syria, where the Iraqi refugee crisis comes closest to showing its true proportions.  At the peak of the crisis in 2007, some 6000 Iraqis traveled the one-way road from Baghdad to Damascus every day.  Now, two years later, an estimated 1.2 million refugees make their home here, such as they can.  That makes for 1.2 million stories in Syria alone.

The trouble with that many stories is that no one person can absorb them all — let alone one person in a position to do anything about the problem.  (UNHCR, the one entity in the world that actually tries to listen to every refugee’s story, has registered only around 250,000 of them in Syria.)  The trouble, too, is that it risks creating a kind of morbid oneupmanship, in which it is no longer enough simply to have suffered the kind of tragedies that would level you and me: constant exposure to violence and danger; the murder of multiple friends and neighbors; the utter rearrangement, for the worse, of your nation as you knew it; the need to leave behind your career, your home, and virtually all your possessions and flee to a country where you are not a citizen, can’t work, and can’t provide for your family; and, subsequently, complete uncertainty about and precious little control over your future.

In an environment where that kind of hardship is the baseline, it’s easy for only the most extreme stories to stand out — particularly gruesome torture cases, for instance, or the murder of children.  This troubling tendency has real consequences.  UNHCR, for instance, is not above relying on a kind of Comparative Suffering metric to make decisions about who should be resettled and who must continue to wait.  Ditto much of the media, which sifts through these stories looking for the best of them — by which we mean, perversely, the worst of them.  But I’ve yet to meet an Iraqi refugee, any Iraqi refugee, whose reasons for leaving his or her homeland were anything short of horrible.

Women wait for their number to be called.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that individual solutions are both ethically indispensable and drastically inadequate. Case-by-case assistance matters; just ask anyone who’s benefited from it.  But it only gets us as far as the level of the story.  To solve the problem at the scale at which it really exists — up there in the unimaginable realm of not one or six or ten or twenty tales but multiple millions of them — we need a solution that operates at that scale, too.  Otherwise, we are looking at 4 million people who feel that they have been betrayed by the United States (at least) twice over: once during in invasion that promised freedom and delivered chaos; and again in its aftermath, when those who fled face far too few viable options for rebuilding their lives.

As for the consequences of that — well, that’s some math we can all do.

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.

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.

Megan Hoelle and C. Eduardo Vargas meet with Mr. Guirgis I. Saleh, General Secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches

During the month of August 2008, Megan Hoelle and C. Eduardo Vargas traveled to Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria to explore future projects in these countries aimed at amplifying the plight of Iraqi refugees. Intersections is dedicated to advocating for the needs of Iraqis who have been displaced due to the current conflict. In particular, Intersections is exploring projects that would bring the individual stories of Iraqis back to the United States, in an effort to mobilize public interest in improving the Iraqi situation. As Vargas stated, “many people in the United States view the Iraqi conflict from a purely political and military perspective, however we seek to show the human side of this engagement and will work diligently to help those Iraqis displaced as a result of it.”Fruitful meetings and site visits with such organizations as Caritas Internationalis, Catholic Relief Services, Mercy Corps, The Middle East Council of Churches, UNHCR, and the U.S. State Department helped Hoelle and Vargas gain first-hand knowledge of the current situation in the three countries. Currently, there are an estimated 50,000 Iraqis living in Lebanon, a market-oriented country that does not provide free social services to its citizens. Iraqis living there are viewed by the government as illegal migrants and are subject to arrest at any time. Lack of legal status for refugees in all three countries is a major concern, interfering with the possibility of obtaining local employment, thereby making the refugees completely dependent on personal savings and humanitarian assistance.

The situation deteriorates the closer one is to Iraq. It is estimated that between 400 – 500 thousand Iraqis are living in Jordan. In this kingdom, the government allows Iraqis to enroll in public education; however due to complex regulations, fear of being deported and lack of degree recognition by other countries, many Iraqis opt not to attend school and are kept out of the workforce.

Hoelle outside UNHCR in Amman, Jordan: As of July 2008, UNHCR Jordan had registered over 54,000 individuals. An estimated 500,000 Iraqis are living in Jordan.

In contrast to Jordan and Lebanon, Syria has been a more welcoming country for Iraqi refugees. Although legal status as refugees has not been conferred and employment opportunities are few and far between, the government and security forces turn a blind eye to their Iraqi “guests” and they are able to participate in quotidian Syrian life. Here Iraqis tend not to live in the same fear as their counterparts in Lebanon and Jordan. However due to the limited resources this country has, and their tight control and inhospitable attitude towards international humanitarian organizations, the refugees have less access to the humanitarian aid received in other two countries.Hoelle and Vargas also met with Iraqis to hear first-hand accounts of the violence they experienced before leaving Iraq, the challenges faced as urban refugees in these new countries and their hopes of being resettled to a third country to start life anew. Hoelle summed up the refugees’ stories by relating how “shocked I was by how commonplace stories of rape and abduction were. Almost every family had experienced some sort of atrocity and were now stuck in a state of suspended animation, waiting to be resettled-an option that only a few of them will be lucky enough to receive-and wondering when they would be able to start really living again.”

For more information about Intersections work with Iraqis, please visit our website.

To see pictures from our trip to the Middle East, click here.

To read more about the current situation of Iraqi refugees, see the links below from the organizations that we met with.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees
www.unhcr.org http://www.unhcr.org/country/jor.html
http://www.unhcr.org/country/lbn.html
http://www.unhcr.org/country/syr.html
http://www.unhcr.org/country/irq.html

Caritas Internationalis
http://www.caritas.org/
http://www.caritas.org.lb/en/homepage.html
http://www.caritas.org/worldmap/mona/lebanon.html http://www.caritas.org/worldmap/mona/jordan.html

Mercy Corps
http://www.mercycorps.org/

http://www.mercycorps.org/countries/jordan

The Middle East Council of Churches
http://www.mec-churches.org/

Catholic Relief Services
http://crs.org/ http://crs.org/Lebanon/