WASHINGTON // On Sunday in the newspaper, we touched on the numbers of Iraqi refugee children in Syria and Jordan now going unschooled, in many cases for several years. Mary Ann Zehr e-mailed us today with a link to a story she and Yasmine Mousa wrote earlier this year that treats the subject in greater detail.

The report, published in Education Week in March, describes the financial, logistical and emotional challenges confronting Iraqi children who wish to attend school in Jordan. They include the costs of tuition, uniforms, books and supplies, and the reluctance of some older Iraqi children, out of school in some cases for years, to go back to grades now filled with much younger Jordanians.

While the United Nations and the Jordanian Ministry of Education had set a target of educating 50,000 Iraqi children in public and private schools, Zehr and Mousa report, only 24,000 had enrolled.

They told the story of 15-year-old Aseel Thafir, who hoped to become an engineer like his father, but who hadn’t attended a regular school since leaving the sixth grade more than four years earlier. And of 16-year-old Aliaa Hussein, who was happy to be taking ninth grade classes, but was worried that it wouldn’t last.

“The day we run out of money, we will go back to Iraq,” she said. “This is my worst fear.”

Officials on all sides have warned of the ill effects of Iraqis growing up undereducated.

Continue reading "More reporting on unschooled youth: 'The lost years'" »

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The publication this week of our series on Iraqi refugees has provoked several messages, including this criticism from Fred Matos: "Your articles ... should have been written years ago."

The Annapolis man says he was in Iraq with the Coalition Provisional Authority in 2003 and 2004, when he worked "very closely" with Iraqi engineers and other professionals. He is hesitant to share more details out of concern for their safety. He says he still keeps in touch with them, some in Jordan.

"Many Iraqi refugees are middle-class highly educated professionals whose leaving creates a major void in Iraq," he writes. "There has been a substantial brain drain that will be very difficult to overcome."

For those who have fled, Matos says, a return "may present some problems."

"Many of the refugees cooperated with Coalition forces, and it's very possible that their lives would be in danger if they return and some anti-U.S. dictator takes over the nation and 'punishes' those who cooperated with the Coalition forces."

Jim Pelura, meanwhile, took exception to the sidebar Sunday in which we described a sense of longing among Iraqi refugees for the days of Saddam.

Continue reading "E-mails, we get e-mails" »

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As go the Sudanese refugees, former Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon warns, so could go the Iraqis.

In a recent blog post, Bacon – an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton who now serves as president of Refugees International – notes a New York Times story last week about rising anger among Sudanese refugee youth.

He quotes from the report by Times correspondent Neil MacFarquhar: “Increasingly angry and outspoken about their uncertain fate, the generation that came of age in the camps is challenging the traditional sheiks, upending the age-old authority structure of their tribal society and complicating efforts to achieve peace.”

The story caught Bacon’s eye, he says, because it highlights a serious problem: “Long stays in camps – either as refugees out of their countries or displaced within their own countries – can radicalize youth. We have seen this over the years with Palestinians and with Afghan refugees, and we could well see it with displaced Iraqi youths who are living in increasingly desperate conditions."

Continue reading "A warning on radicalized refugee youth" »

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WASHINGTON // Human Rights First, one of the most vocal advocates of the Iraqi refugees, is calling on president-elect Barack Obama to make good on his campaign commitments to displaced Iraqis by appointing an Iraqi refugee coordinator in the White House.

The New York-based group also wants Obama to hold the Iraqi government to refugee-related benchmarks, to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian aid to the region and to announce a two-year campaign to resettle 60,000 of the most vulnerable Iraqi refugees.

"President-elect Obama has said that we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in," says Elisa Massimino, Executive Director and CEO of Human Rights First. "There will be no responsible withdrawal unless the new administration helps secure a future for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees -- by improving their situation in Syria and Jordan, resettling the most vulnerable, and ensuring that refugee returns to Iraq are voluntary."

During the campaign, Obama called the displacement of Iraqis "a threat to the security of the Middle East and to our common humanity." He spoke of forming an international working group that would include countries from the region, European and Asian allies and the United Nations, and said the United States should boost spending on the issue to at least $2 billion.

"We have a strategic interest -- and a moral obligation -- to act," he said.

Continue reading "Call for Obama to appoint Iraq refugee czar" »

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WASHINGTON // One way that resettlement agencies try to ease the refugee experience in the United States is to connect new arrivals to existing communities.

But a new State Department policy is actually steering Iraqi refugees away from one of the oldest and largest Arab-American communities in the country, U.S. News and World Report says in an interesting new story.

The magazine's Amanda Ruggeri reports that Iraqis who went to settle in Metropolitan Detroit are being sent elsewhere unless they have close relatives already in the economically depressed area. The decision, which Ruggeri says was implemented in July, follows a request by resettlement agencies overwhelmed by the influx.

Michigan resettled 3,044 Iraqis in fiscal years 2007 and 2008, nearly a fifth of the total received by the United States and second only to California. Officials are expecting more Iraqis to be resettled nationwide in fiscal 2009.

if you have more people but you have no more money -- how are you going to serve those people?" asks Belmin Pinjic, director of refugee services at Lutheran Social Services of Michigan. "You use the resources available from within a community, but those resources are limited."

Continue reading "Steering Iraqis away from Detroit" »

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WASHINGTON // While relations between Shia and Sunni Muslims have improved, a U.S. panel reported this week, “ongoing, severe abuses” of religious freedom continue in Iraq.

In light of attacks on Christians, Sabean Mandeans and other minorities, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is urging the U.S. government to designate Iraq a “country of particular concern.” The designation would group Iraq with some of the most repressive countries on earth.

"The lack of effective [Iraqi] government action to protect these communities from abuses has established Iraq among the most dangerous places on earth for religious minorities," commission Chairwoman Felice D. Gaer said on Tuesday. In a report, the commission described the situation for Chaldo-Assyrian and other Christians, Sabean Mandeans and Yazidis as “dire.”

“These groups do not have militia or tribal structures to protect them and do not receive adequate official protection,” the commission concluded. “Their members continue to experience targeted violence and to flee to other areas within Iraq or other countries, where the minorities represent a disproportionately high percentage among Iraqi refugees. Marginalized legally, politically, and economically, they are caught in the middle of a struggle between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the central Iraqi government for control of northern areas where their communities are concentrated.

“The combined effect of all this has been to endanger these ancient communities’ very existence in Iraq,” Gaer said.

The commisison describes country-of-particular concern designation as “the beginning of focused diplomatic activity required by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) from which important obligations in the form of consequent actions flow.” Countries currently designated include Burma, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Continue reading "U.S. panel: Religious freedom under attack in Iraq" »

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WASHINGTON // The news today that nearly 100 Sudanese refugees in Iraq now are headed to Romania highlights the plight of a particularly vulnerable group: Those who were already refugees in Iraq when the war triggered the current crisis.

The 97 men, women and children fled Sudan in the late 1980s. While they fear a return to that troubled country, a spokesman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said today, conditions in Iraq have hardly been much better.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, the Sudanese have suffered abuse, blackmail, eviction and assaults by militias. A total of 17 were killed between December 2004 and February 2005.

“Because of this targeting by the insurgent groups, the refugees tried to flee Iraq but were not successful,” Redmond said. They were stranded in a camp outside Al Rutbah town in the Al Anbar desert, some 50 miles east of the Jordanian border.

“Here they were subject to severe weather conditions and harassment by militias,” Redmond said.

The experience in some ways mirrors that of Palestinians in Iraq, a group that was seen as priviledged under Saddam but has since been targeted by militants. A coalition of refugee advocates reported last month that some 3,000 Palestinians remain stranded in three camps along the Iraqi-Syrian border.

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WASHINGTON // The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees announced on Monday that it had referred its 50,000th Iraqi for resettlement. Buried in the press release is the story of another refugee facing a horrible dilemma.

The woman, identified as “Reem,” fled Iraq for Damascus with a two-year-old daughter after her husband and another infant daughter were abducted by masked men in Baghdad. The release says she has paid US$3,000 trying to find out what happened to them, to no avail.

Now she has been accepted for resettlement to the United States. She cannot decide between continuing to look for her loved ones or moving on. She has until early next week to accept resettlement.

"Sometimes I wish the monsters that did this to my little baby and my husband would call me to tell me they are both dead so that I could leave,” she says. “I'm so tired, so very tired of hoping.”

Continue reading "A grim milestone, and a horrible dilemma" »

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WASHINGTON // António Guterres doesn’t single out Iraqis at the start of his opinion piece Wednesday in the Daily Telegraph of London. But the U.N. high commissioner for refugees describes their predicament exactly:

“As each new conflict erupts, the world's newspapers and television screens are filled with pictures of masses on the move, fleeing from their own country with just the clothes on their back and the few possessions they are able to carry,” writes Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal.

“But what happens once the exodus is over, the journalists have packed their bags and the world has turned its attention to the next crisis? In the vast majority of cases, the refugees are left behind, obliged to spend the best years of their lives in shabby camps and shanty settlements, exposed to all kind of dangers and with serious restrictions placed upon their rights and freedoms.”

He describes the great majority of refugees as effectively trapped between home countries wracked by war or human rights violations and host countries that will not allow them to to integrate with local populations. He argues that refugees are a “responsibility of the international community as a whole, and can only be effectively tackled by means of collective and cooperative action.”

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BALTIMORE // I was invited to dinner last night by a family that in some ways typifies the Iraqi resettlement experience.

Faisal is a 62-year-old engineer who served as an interpreter and adviser to U.S. commanders and diplomats after the 2003 invasion. His wife is a pediatrician; they have two sons, aged 13 and 14.

After a series of anonymous threats – over the phone, under the door, through neighbors – the family fled Baghdad in December 2006. They spent time in Syria and Jordan before arriving in the United States in May.

Fasial -- he asks that his last name be withheld -- had asked to be resettled near Washington so he could look for government work as a cultural and political advisor on Iraq. He blames much of the violence in Iraq on a failure by Americans and Iraqis to understand each other.

His wife, meanwhile, wants to resume her medical practice.

For now, Faisal is working as a loan counselor with a Baltimore nonprofit. He wants to pursue graduate study in political science. His wife, who can’t practice here until she passes the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, has found part-time work as a medical interpreter at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Continue reading "In Northeast Baltimore, a 'typical American family'" »

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