Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Times
December 4, 2007 By Cara Buckley
BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 — At least 25,000 Iraqi refugees have returned to their beleaguered homeland from Syria since mid-September, according to preliminary estimates released Monday by the Iraqi Red Crescent. The figure represents a fraction of the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who fled to Syria in recent years to escape the sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in Iraq.
The agency said the recent widespread drop in violence in Iraq had drawn some refugees back, though it added that many had also run out of money. Recent visa restrictions were forcing people back too.
The vast majority of the returning refugees, roughly 20,000, came back to the capital, Baghdad, where their well-being is far from assured. The agency said many had found squatters in their homes and had had to seek sanctuary elsewhere, leading to a rise in the number of people displaced within Iraq.
The Iraqi government has estimated that a much larger number of Iraqis was returning from Syria. It put the number at 60,000 for September and October, which included all Iraqis who crossed the Syrian border during that time.
The refugees are finding an altered landscape, with neighborhoods largely ethnically homogenous, reshaped by sectarian strife. Unemployment also hovers at roughly 40 percent, and corruption is rampant, with many people paying bribes to obtain jobs.
In a news release on Monday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki blamed the government of Saddam Hussein for the widespread corruption.
“We inherited the corruption from previous regimes, and in this new era, the administrative and financial corruption is still going on,” he said. But 2008, he said, would be the year that a “war on corruption” would be declared.
“And also a war on those ignorant and lazy people who do not properly carry out their duties,” Mr. Maliki said.
The American military has cautioned that the Iraqi government is ill-prepared to handle the myriad issues faced by returning refugees, among them securing shelter, food and aid.
And the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that Iraq is too unstable for large-scale repatriation. Many Baghdad neighborhoods are still unsafe for United Nations workers to visit, according to an agency spokeswoman, a fact that is stymieing efforts to gauge how the returnees are faring.
“Generally, refugees are the best judges of when it is time to go back,” the spokeswoman, Sybella Wilkes, said from Damascus. “We think it’s a very tenuous situation that can change, but we’re ready to support people that make that decision.”
The Iraqi government is paying each family that returns from abroad 1 million Iraqi dinars, or about $821, roughly enough for four months of rent in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood.
Sporadic violence flared throughout the country on Monday. Maj. Gen. Fawzi Hussein Mohammed, a Sunni adviser to the minister of the interior, was shot and killed in Khadra, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood on the western outskirts of Baghdad.
Five off-duty Iraqi soldiers were kidnapped southwest of the northern oil city of Kirkuk. The authorities later found the bodies of four of them. They had been tortured, and the whereabouts of the fifth soldier was unknown.
The group had been abducted on its way to a wedding party for a brother of one of them.
Abeer Mohammed and Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.
December 4, 2007 By Cara Buckley
BAGHDAD, Dec. 3 — At least 25,000 Iraqi refugees have returned to their beleaguered homeland from Syria since mid-September, according to preliminary estimates released Monday by the Iraqi Red Crescent. The figure represents a fraction of the estimated 1.5 million Iraqis who fled to Syria in recent years to escape the sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing in Iraq.
The agency said the recent widespread drop in violence in Iraq had drawn some refugees back, though it added that many had also run out of money. Recent visa restrictions were forcing people back too.
The vast majority of the returning refugees, roughly 20,000, came back to the capital, Baghdad, where their well-being is far from assured. The agency said many had found squatters in their homes and had had to seek sanctuary elsewhere, leading to a rise in the number of people displaced within Iraq.
The Iraqi government has estimated that a much larger number of Iraqis was returning from Syria. It put the number at 60,000 for September and October, which included all Iraqis who crossed the Syrian border during that time.
The refugees are finding an altered landscape, with neighborhoods largely ethnically homogenous, reshaped by sectarian strife. Unemployment also hovers at roughly 40 percent, and corruption is rampant, with many people paying bribes to obtain jobs.
In a news release on Monday, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki blamed the government of Saddam Hussein for the widespread corruption.
“We inherited the corruption from previous regimes, and in this new era, the administrative and financial corruption is still going on,” he said. But 2008, he said, would be the year that a “war on corruption” would be declared.
“And also a war on those ignorant and lazy people who do not properly carry out their duties,” Mr. Maliki said.
The American military has cautioned that the Iraqi government is ill-prepared to handle the myriad issues faced by returning refugees, among them securing shelter, food and aid.
And the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that Iraq is too unstable for large-scale repatriation. Many Baghdad neighborhoods are still unsafe for United Nations workers to visit, according to an agency spokeswoman, a fact that is stymieing efforts to gauge how the returnees are faring.
“Generally, refugees are the best judges of when it is time to go back,” the spokeswoman, Sybella Wilkes, said from Damascus. “We think it’s a very tenuous situation that can change, but we’re ready to support people that make that decision.”
The Iraqi government is paying each family that returns from abroad 1 million Iraqi dinars, or about $821, roughly enough for four months of rent in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood.
Sporadic violence flared throughout the country on Monday. Maj. Gen. Fawzi Hussein Mohammed, a Sunni adviser to the minister of the interior, was shot and killed in Khadra, a Sunni-dominated neighborhood on the western outskirts of Baghdad.
Five off-duty Iraqi soldiers were kidnapped southwest of the northern oil city of Kirkuk. The authorities later found the bodies of four of them. They had been tortured, and the whereabouts of the fifth soldier was unknown.
The group had been abducted on its way to a wedding party for a brother of one of them.
Abeer Mohammed and Mudhafer al-Husaini contributed reporting from Baghdad, and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kirkuk.