03/13/2007
Newsweek

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My Uncle Brahim is trapped inside his Baghdad home--waiting to flee a country that six months ago he swore he'd never leave. With him are his wife, his hugely pregnant daughter and his 1-year-old grandson. I'm not sure how to say "cabin fever" in Arabic, but I'm pretty sure they have it. They've been holed up for months in that house as battles rage in and around their Mansour neighborhood...

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Those cousins who have made it out of Iraq alive are part of the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world. An estimated 2.3 million Iraqis have fled the country since the 2003 invasion. They represent the largest displacement of people in the region since the Palestinian diaspora nearly a half century ago. About 50,000 people escape Baghdad each month. A staggering 1.7 million are displaced within Iraq, while almost 2 million more have sought refuge in Syria and Jordan, 130,000 in Egypt and 50,000 in Iran. Even Sweden is feeling the effects of this war: last year alone, 9,000 Iraqis applied for asylum there, and 90 percent of those requests were approved.

By contrast, the United States has taken in 466 Iraqi refugees since 2003. "This is not just a regional crisis, it's a global one," says Kristele Younes, a Refugees International advocate monitoring the Iraqi refugee flow. "But for the Bush administration to address the problem they'd have to admit failure in Iraq, and I don't see that happening any time soon." Responding to the criticism, the State Department recently announced plans to refer 7,000 Iraqis to the U.S. Resettlement Program by September. Sami's 19-year-old son, Ausama, heard about the openings and immediately text-messaged me. "There are some spaces for us there? Please send 2 me information soon." How can I tell him that with those odds, getting into America is about as likely as winning the lottery?

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Iraq's middle classes were also the least-sectarian slice of society. Brahim's block in Mansour was once a comfortable mix of Sunni and Shiite. The same is true of his friends and family. One of his daughters is married to a Sunni, and so are at least seven more first cousins that I know of. But most of Brahim's neighbors--many of whom worked with him in the Oil Ministry before they retired--fled a year ago when sectarian violence engulfed the city. Now, he says, their homes are empty or inhabited by strangers. "Sunni, Shiite, no one care before," says Brahim's pregnant daughter, Aliya, in heavily accented English. "Now it is the reason they use for this killing."

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Leaving has also become more difficult with each passing week. Brahim refused to pay $2,000 in bribes for a set of Iraq's new updated passports (which most Iraqis must now have to travel), so three months later they still haven't been issued. To get to Jordan or Syria by car, he'd have to pay a driver anywhere from $250 to $600 per passenger (which is still less than one-way airline tickets), and they'd need to pass through Iraq's deadly Anbar province. They could not bring more than a suitcase or two with them, for fear of alerting border agents that they were planning on more than a vacation. If by some slim chance they did make it past Jordanian immigration, they'd face disgruntled locals, a cost of living that's tripled since 2003 due to the massive influx of refugees and no prospects of work.

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