Lost at home: Refugees in Iraq

07Oct07

He has a personality split three ways to ensure safety for himself and his family.

She hasn’t been able to leave home because she might be raped if she goes too far.

Their children have to guess which last name to use when they are stopped in the road: Which should they be, Sunni or Shia? The choice could determine whether they go home or are kidnapped tonight.

For the last several months, stories about Iraq’s refugees have become more and more frequent. Varieties emerge among them:

• Refugees fleeing from Basra and Baghdad, seeking safety in the northern region controlled by the Kurds and said to be safer than the rest of the country. There, they are attacked.
• Refugees in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, applying in wave after wave, some of them starting to resettle in different neighborhoods outside the camps. Unwelcome by neighbors and governments, they too are subject to attack, to predatory rental rates and claims for ‘protection money’ that will keep their rooms un-looted and their women rape-free, if they’re lucky.
• Refugees in Iraq itself: those unable to get out but desperately in need of protection because they have worked for the U.S. and are considered spies deserving of execution. They are served notice with a bloody handprint on the door, or a bullet on the stoop. If they can, they leave. Others have not worked for the Americans, but it doesn’t matter: they are suspect anyway because they are different. The Mandaeans fit this category, as the last surviving Gnostic sect in the world, their religion and traditions going back over 2000 years, predating Christianity & Islam. Outcast from mainstream society by virtue of their religious and cultural differences, the Mandaeans are used to laying low – they’ve done it for decades already, for millennia. Still, they are found, their children kidnapped, their bodies tortured and mutilated in order to extract a payment, or to exact some imagined revenge, or simply so that the perpetrator can feel a little power in the midst of so much war.

Filed under: Iraq, refugees, war   |  Leave a Comment