Among the myriad disasters visited on Iraq since the American invasion of 2003, one of the least-discussed has been the mass exodus of Iraqis from their homeland. That is somewhat ironic, since it is this disaster which is likely to spawn the most dire long-term consequences – and not just for Iraq, but for the entire world.

By conservative estimate, over two million Iraqis now live as refugees in other countries. At least an equal number are “internally-displaced” within Iraq, having been ethnically cleansed from their villages or neighborhoods by one sectarian militia or another. In sheer numbers, this represents the greatest dispersal of a nation’s population since the end of World War II.

This dispersal has occurred in successive, if uneven, waves. The first to leave, in the days immediately before and after the American invasion, were those with ties to the regime of Saddam Hussein: senior government officials, military officers, Baathist Party members. As Iraq descended further into anarchy, the exodus intensified. By 2006, with vast areas of Iraq turned into murderous free-fire zones under the de facto rule of militias or criminal gangs – and, in practice, it was often impossible to distinguish between the two – the exodus became a veritable flood.

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That this flood has now ebbed is held out by the Bush Administration as proof that their “surge” strategy in Iraq is working, and that the nation is slowly on the mend. Conveniently omitted from this argument is the fact that both Jordan and Syria – the two countries that have taken in some 90% of Iraq’s refugees – have both closed their borders to any more.

This past February and March, I and Paolo Pellegrin, interviewed several dozen Iraqi refugee families in Jordan and Syria. Naturally, we wanted to learn of the circumstances that caused them to flee their homeland, but we also sought answers to the most crucial question: what comes next? It is a cruel axiom of history that those with the financial resources and/or acumen to flee a country’s civil war are the very ones most needed to rebuild it once that war has passed. If and when peace returns to Iraq, will those Iraqis now living in limbo in Amman and Damascus return to start over?

The responses we heard are not encouraging. Many remain so traumatized by what they endured in Iraq that, even in their refuge, they exist in a kind of state of suspended shock; for them, any return to the place of their horrors is unthinkable. Others have lost everything they spent their lives working for, or have seen their ethnic or religious community decimated by the militias; for them, there is quite literally nothing and nowhere to go back to. And the one comment made by virtually everyone we spoke with, including the minority who hope to go back someday, is that any return is impossible so long as the current Iraqi government is in power. It is the Maliki regime, we heard constantly, that has institutionalized the sectarian divisions in the country, and that is a roadblock to any chance of national reconciliation - and since the Americans support Maliki, where is there to turn?

Where they are trying to turn is to any other country that will take them – but to very limited success. A few countries, notably Sweden and Australia, have granted asylum to sizeable numbers of Iraqis, but the total number of allotments granted by Western nations represent just a tiny fraction of those applying. Perhaps the most shocking in this regard has been the United States. In fiscal year 2007, it granted asylum to a mere 756* Iraqis. Under intense international pressure, it set a target-number of 12,000 for fiscal year 2008, but is thus far on pace to admit only half that. The cynical explanation for this policy, one put forward by many Iraqi refugees, is that the American government simply doesn’t care. The more likely – and only slightly less cynical – explanation is that granting refugee status to large numbers of Iraqis would undercut the Bush Administration’s argument that Iraq is being put back together, that the refugee crisis is a temporary problem that will solve itself as conditions in Iraq “continue to improve.” Until that happens, the vast majority of Iraqi refugees will remain exactly where they are now, in the squalid tenements of Jordan and Syria, enduring the futureless lives that are the common lot of refugees everywhere.

“What the Americans have created in Iraq is the new Palestine,” one Iraqi in Syria told me, referring to the Palestinian refugee crisis that accompanied the creation of Israel in 1948. This is an alarming thought. The world has been grappling with the bloody consequences of the Palestinian diaspora for the past 60 years. It seems likely that it will be dealing with the consequences of the Iraqi diaspora for just as long.

Scott Anderson

Paolo Pellegrin

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