Impact Of The Iraq War On ... Iraqis
The surge has worked, indeed. The war is a task from God, indeed. The Iraq war was justified, indeed. The Iraq war is a big success, indeed.
(And I could go on and on like this - but I won't)
Here's something that should never be put aside for consideration, namely the chaos and hardship that has fallen upon millions of Iraqis in direct result to the U.S.' wrongful invasion and occupation of Iraq, as the following article reveals:
(And I could go on and on like this - but I won't)
Here's something that should never be put aside for consideration, namely the chaos and hardship that has fallen upon millions of Iraqis in direct result to the U.S.' wrongful invasion and occupation of Iraq, as the following article reveals:
Iraq’s Forgotten Refugees
By Elizabeth Dinovella
When I walked into Samia Kouzah’s dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn’t recognize her daughter as human. Rahma, age twenty months, has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon character’s.
Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahma said she wouldn’t live past one year old. In September, Rahma turns two.
Rahma sits on her mother’s lap, enveloped in Samia’s blue and beige veil, and begins to fuss. “She has a fever,” Samia explains. “She’s teething.”
Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. She shows me her ID. She is technically not an Iraqi. And she is not Jordanian. Her six-year-old son, Mohammed, isn’t able to attend public schools.
Her family was part of the mass 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She says Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began. Her husband worked as an electrician in Baghdad. But he’s been deported from Jordan (he, too, lacked legal residency) and is now living in Bethlehem. He’s not working and cannot support the family.
Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan’s third largest city, forty minutes away from Amman. It’s a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants—Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis. (Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, hailed from these poverty-stricken streets. “Zarqawi” literally means “someone from Zarqa.”)
Jordan and Syria, not the United States, have felt the brunt of the refugee wave that Bush’s invasion has caused. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria, and the annual cost of accommodating these Iraqi refugees is $1 billion per country. “Because they are not huddled in camps, these refugees do not get the attention and help they deserve from the U.S. and the international community,” states a recent IRC report on Iraqi refugees.
Jordan’s government grants legal residency to a very small percentage of the estimated one million Iraqis who have fled there. Wealthy Iraqis can buy residency with a deposit of 100,000 Jordanian dinars ($141,000 U.S.) in the bank. Some middle class professionals are able to get work permits. But many Iraqis are simply overstaying their visas. The Jordanian government has not officially recognized them as refugees. They are considered guests, and life is not easy for them.
Samia says she is willing to work but she can’t leave the house due to her daughter’s condition. The family is surviving on assistance from a brother and from groups such as Al Tamkeen, a local project funded by the IRC and implemented by the Near East Foundation.
Project directors from the Near East Foundation and Al Tamkeen, who are visiting Samia with me, ask her if she needs anything. “Only bring my husband back,” she responds.
The smell of greens simmering in garlic floats through the apartment of Miriam Haddad. A widow with three young sons, Haddad has shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. She’s wearing a navy blue T-shirt with white stripes and jeans and offers us water, juice, and Iraqi cookies.
A wooden diagram of Iraq sits on the shelf next to a statue of Jesus. Haddad, who asked me not to use her real name due to fear, is an Ashuri Christian Iraqi who arrived in Zarqa from Baghdad on November 1, 2004. She had lost her job in the ministry of education, she says, due to discrimination. After the U.S. invasion, things changed at work. She got a new manager who “had a long beard,” she recalls. “He said, ‘The crusaders are here,’ ” and he was referring to U.S. troops.
Before the war, her husband was the head of reception at the Sheraton in Baghdad. Tourism tanked so he resigned. Later, he developed stomach cancer. Haddad came to Zarqa after her husband passed away. “Zarqa is cheaper, and that’s why we’re here,” she says.
Haddad’s family is one of the quarter of Iraqi refugee households headed by women, according to the United Nations. Her boys, ages fourteen, eleven, and nine, suffer from trauma. They rarely go outside beyond school and are not social with any other kids. Despite psychological treatment in Jordan, the eleven-year-old still pees on himself. In Baghdad, he witnessed a killing on the way to school. The youngest son is very attached to her, Haddad says, “and won’t leave me at all.”
Her modestly furnished apartment runs 50 Jordanian dinars ($71 U.S.) a month. She has registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) but lacks legal residency in Jordan, which makes it difficult to find a job. She applied to work at a sewing factory but quit after ten days because she was uncomfortable, she says shyly, hinting at sexual advances from men there. She gets 140 Jordanian dinars a month ($198 U.S.) from nongovernmental organizations, and in-kind assistance, such as school uniforms and supplies, from other groups. Even in Jordan, Haddad says, she faces religious discrimination. The woman in charge at one charity is Shia and reluctant to help a Christian.
She has some relatives in Baghdad but has no desire to go back. Zarqa is so cheap she feels she can’t move anywhere else.
She mentions she got her couch from the curb and cleaned it up. “I hesitate to ask for help,” she says. Last winter, she received carpets, a heater, and blankets from a local group. Haddad sold the carpets for cash.
Ahmad is a stocky young man with a shaved head and goatee. He was studying business management at the University of Baghdad when the Iraq War began. When I arrive at his apartment in Amman, he is sitting in his living room on a gold brocade couch. He had been watching satellite TV, and a Playstation 2 sits on the rug in front of it. Photos of his family rest on top on the TV, including one of his father as a young man carrying a child on his shoulders.
Ahmad doesn’t want to give his last name out of fear. His family left the Al-Jami’a university neighborhood in Baghdad after receiving death threats shortly after the American tanks rolled into Iraq’s capital. “On Thursday, when the American troops got into Baghdad, some people welcomed them,” Ahmad says. “Not all people were happy under Saddam’s regime.” Many people thought the Americans would improve the economy and rebuild institutions, “but none of that happened,” he adds.
In 2004, Ahmad decided to go back to Baghdad to finish his studies. On his way, gangs attacked him, he says, pointing to injuries to his shoulder and head. When he arrived in Baghdad, he went to the hospital and received only a bit of treatment, he says. All the hospitals in Baghdad “are full of wounded people and dead people,” he notes. “There were higher priorities.”
He lived with some relatives until he finished school at the end of the year. He wanted to pick up his certificate, but his friends told him that some people had come to the university and asked about him. So he got a car and came back to Amman.
Ahmad’s father wasn’t so lucky. Before the war, he worked in the foreign ministry. In 2005, he went back to Iraq to see if he could sell one of his three houses. Some people contacted him there and said they were interested in buying the house. But it was a trap, Ahmad says. A gang called his family and said we are the ones who kidnapped your father and we want $100,000 in ransom.
“After negotiations, because we did not have that amount, they went down to $50,000,” Ahmad says. His family mortgaged the apartment they owned in Amman, and his mom sold her gold jewelry. They also took money from people they knew to raise the ransom.
(Keep reading ...)
By Elizabeth Dinovella
When I walked into Samia Kouzah’s dingy two-room flat in Zarqa, Jordan, I almost didn’t recognize her daughter as human. Rahma, age twenty months, has a severely deformed skull, shaped like a mushroom, and her eyes bulge out like a cartoon character’s.
Samia became pregnant with her daughter while living in Baghdad. She suspects radioactive materials used in U.S. bombs caused the deformities. The doctor who delivered Rahma said she wouldn’t live past one year old. In September, Rahma turns two.
Rahma sits on her mother’s lap, enveloped in Samia’s blue and beige veil, and begins to fuss. “She has a fever,” Samia explains. “She’s teething.”
Samia is a thirty-three-year-old Palestinian woman born in Iraq. She shows me her ID. She is technically not an Iraqi. And she is not Jordanian. Her six-year-old son, Mohammed, isn’t able to attend public schools.
Her family was part of the mass 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. The Kouzah family fled Baghdad in 2006. She says Iraqis went after Palestinians after the U.S. occupation began. Her husband worked as an electrician in Baghdad. But he’s been deported from Jordan (he, too, lacked legal residency) and is now living in Bethlehem. He’s not working and cannot support the family.
Because of her legal status, she finds herself stuck in Zarqa, Jordan’s third largest city, forty minutes away from Amman. It’s a bleak, dusty industrial town that for decades has absorbed waves of immigrants—Egyptians, Palestinians, Chechens, and now Iraqis. (Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, former leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, hailed from these poverty-stricken streets. “Zarqawi” literally means “someone from Zarqa.”)
Jordan and Syria, not the United States, have felt the brunt of the refugee wave that Bush’s invasion has caused. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) estimates there are 1.6 million Iraqi refugees living in Jordan and Syria, and the annual cost of accommodating these Iraqi refugees is $1 billion per country. “Because they are not huddled in camps, these refugees do not get the attention and help they deserve from the U.S. and the international community,” states a recent IRC report on Iraqi refugees.
Jordan’s government grants legal residency to a very small percentage of the estimated one million Iraqis who have fled there. Wealthy Iraqis can buy residency with a deposit of 100,000 Jordanian dinars ($141,000 U.S.) in the bank. Some middle class professionals are able to get work permits. But many Iraqis are simply overstaying their visas. The Jordanian government has not officially recognized them as refugees. They are considered guests, and life is not easy for them.
Samia says she is willing to work but she can’t leave the house due to her daughter’s condition. The family is surviving on assistance from a brother and from groups such as Al Tamkeen, a local project funded by the IRC and implemented by the Near East Foundation.
Project directors from the Near East Foundation and Al Tamkeen, who are visiting Samia with me, ask her if she needs anything. “Only bring my husband back,” she responds.
The smell of greens simmering in garlic floats through the apartment of Miriam Haddad. A widow with three young sons, Haddad has shoulder-length brown hair and blue eyes. She’s wearing a navy blue T-shirt with white stripes and jeans and offers us water, juice, and Iraqi cookies.
A wooden diagram of Iraq sits on the shelf next to a statue of Jesus. Haddad, who asked me not to use her real name due to fear, is an Ashuri Christian Iraqi who arrived in Zarqa from Baghdad on November 1, 2004. She had lost her job in the ministry of education, she says, due to discrimination. After the U.S. invasion, things changed at work. She got a new manager who “had a long beard,” she recalls. “He said, ‘The crusaders are here,’ ” and he was referring to U.S. troops.
Before the war, her husband was the head of reception at the Sheraton in Baghdad. Tourism tanked so he resigned. Later, he developed stomach cancer. Haddad came to Zarqa after her husband passed away. “Zarqa is cheaper, and that’s why we’re here,” she says.
Haddad’s family is one of the quarter of Iraqi refugee households headed by women, according to the United Nations. Her boys, ages fourteen, eleven, and nine, suffer from trauma. They rarely go outside beyond school and are not social with any other kids. Despite psychological treatment in Jordan, the eleven-year-old still pees on himself. In Baghdad, he witnessed a killing on the way to school. The youngest son is very attached to her, Haddad says, “and won’t leave me at all.”
Her modestly furnished apartment runs 50 Jordanian dinars ($71 U.S.) a month. She has registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) but lacks legal residency in Jordan, which makes it difficult to find a job. She applied to work at a sewing factory but quit after ten days because she was uncomfortable, she says shyly, hinting at sexual advances from men there. She gets 140 Jordanian dinars a month ($198 U.S.) from nongovernmental organizations, and in-kind assistance, such as school uniforms and supplies, from other groups. Even in Jordan, Haddad says, she faces religious discrimination. The woman in charge at one charity is Shia and reluctant to help a Christian.
She has some relatives in Baghdad but has no desire to go back. Zarqa is so cheap she feels she can’t move anywhere else.
She mentions she got her couch from the curb and cleaned it up. “I hesitate to ask for help,” she says. Last winter, she received carpets, a heater, and blankets from a local group. Haddad sold the carpets for cash.
Ahmad is a stocky young man with a shaved head and goatee. He was studying business management at the University of Baghdad when the Iraq War began. When I arrive at his apartment in Amman, he is sitting in his living room on a gold brocade couch. He had been watching satellite TV, and a Playstation 2 sits on the rug in front of it. Photos of his family rest on top on the TV, including one of his father as a young man carrying a child on his shoulders.
Ahmad doesn’t want to give his last name out of fear. His family left the Al-Jami’a university neighborhood in Baghdad after receiving death threats shortly after the American tanks rolled into Iraq’s capital. “On Thursday, when the American troops got into Baghdad, some people welcomed them,” Ahmad says. “Not all people were happy under Saddam’s regime.” Many people thought the Americans would improve the economy and rebuild institutions, “but none of that happened,” he adds.
In 2004, Ahmad decided to go back to Baghdad to finish his studies. On his way, gangs attacked him, he says, pointing to injuries to his shoulder and head. When he arrived in Baghdad, he went to the hospital and received only a bit of treatment, he says. All the hospitals in Baghdad “are full of wounded people and dead people,” he notes. “There were higher priorities.”
He lived with some relatives until he finished school at the end of the year. He wanted to pick up his certificate, but his friends told him that some people had come to the university and asked about him. So he got a car and came back to Amman.
Ahmad’s father wasn’t so lucky. Before the war, he worked in the foreign ministry. In 2005, he went back to Iraq to see if he could sell one of his three houses. Some people contacted him there and said they were interested in buying the house. But it was a trap, Ahmad says. A gang called his family and said we are the ones who kidnapped your father and we want $100,000 in ransom.
“After negotiations, because we did not have that amount, they went down to $50,000,” Ahmad says. His family mortgaged the apartment they owned in Amman, and his mom sold her gold jewelry. They also took money from people they knew to raise the ransom.
(Keep reading ...)
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