March 12, 2008

Iraqi refugees who seek safety in Syria strive for lasting home

In the predominantly Shiite Muslim neighbourhood of Set Zeinab in Damascus lives an Iraqi tailor who spends his days making women's head coverings.

Middle-aged Kazin explains to visitors that the light-coloured cotton fabric he uses is suitable for his poor eyesight, a result of the torture he suffered when he was a prisoner under the rule of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Once Kazin had been a prominent tailor with his own shop in Karbala, Iraq, but he was arrested because several of his clients were political dissidents. "I want to return to Karbala," says Kazin, "but I know that my shop was taken."

When his veiled 16-year-old daughter, Fatima, enters the room and shyly greets the visitors, he says that his greatest hope now is that she will someday become a surgeon.

Gladys, a woman in her early forties, enjoyed her work as a translator for foreign contractors in Baghdad. Her husband built restaurants for foreign companies in Falluja and Ramadi. After those companies left Iraq, three of Gladys's translator friends were murdered in Basra and Mosul, and she received death threats while waiting to enter Baghdad's Green Zone, the heavily guarded area under US control, where she hoped to find work.

Today, she is a teacher in a private school in the Christian Geramana neighbourhood of Damascus. She says she misses her vocation as a translator, and does not earn enough to support her family in Syria, where the influx of Iraqi refugees has increased the cost of living.

"Daily we worry because we have to use our savings to meet the cost of the apartment and food," says Gladys. When aid workers visited her classroom she took one aside and asked if they could help with her application to emigrate to the West. She can neither imagine returning to Iraq nor staying in Syria.

Refugees who flee war and find safe haven are then faced with the problem of finding work to support their families. This is the greatest dilemma for the 4.2 million Iraqis who have been displaced from their homes since 2003. Of that number, 1.5 million live in Syria, a poor country barely able to provide jobs for its own people. Iraqi "guests" are not allowed to work, and secular and religious aid agencies report increasing child labour and prostitution among the refugees.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that Iraqi refugees throughout the region are becoming increasingly desperate.

In the case of both Kazin and Gladys their children receive tuition assistance through the US-based International Orthodox Christian Charities programme. Such aid does not solve the complex problems of refugees, who can neither return to their homeland nor stay permanently in their host country. It is, however, a first step towards addressing a crisis that some are calling the Middle East's ticking time bomb.

Amal Morcos is the director of communications for IOCC, an affiliate of the ecumenical international emergency aid group Action by Churches Together (ACT) International. She wrote the original version of this story for IOCC.