Nir Rosen: No Going Back-Little relief in sight for millions of displaced Iraqis

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No Going Back
Little relief in sight for millions of displaced Iraqis Nir Rosen



“You have now entered Iraq,” my taxi driver joked. We had in fact just entered Sayida Zeinab, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus. This shrine city, long a destination for Shia pilgrims, had become home to an estimated one million Iraqis seeking refuge in Syria. “Everybody is Iraqi,” laughed another driver after several people he had asked for directions replied in Iraqi Arabic that they did not know. Indeed, walking through the alleys of Sayida Zeinab I felt as though I were in Iraq, except it was safe. After nearly three years in the war-torn country, I had started to fear Iraqi men; all strangers were potential kidnappers.

Along with the refugees, some of Iraq’s institutions have come to Syria too, although, so far, the sectarian violence has not. In one alley I came across the famous Baghdad restaurant “Patchi al Hati.” Patchi is sheep’s head, the meal I dreaded most during my years in Iraq. The restaurant’s owner had fled four months earlier “because of the terrorism and looting,” the chef explained over an immense steaming pot giving off the pungent smell. Anybody with money in Iraq was a target for kidnappers and extortionists. “They heard we were a famous restaurant and thought we were millionaires,” he told me.

In another alley I walked past the field office of one of Iraq’s most important Shia clerics, Ayatollah Kadhim al Haeri. Following the American war that overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, al Haeri had urged his followers to kill Baathists. Further down the street I found Muqtada al Sadr’s representative’s office, also guarded by security officials. The two Shia clerics had once been close but had fallen out. Al Sadr is now considered the most powerful man in Iraq; his militia, the Madhi Army, controls much of Iraq’s security forces and is largely responsible for sectarian attacks against Sunnis.

Inside the office of the Sadr Martyr, as Muqtada’s office was called (in reference to his father), I attended a recitation on of the story of Karbala. It was the month of Muharram, when Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Prophet Muhammed’s grandson Hussein, slain in 680 in a battle that crystallized the division between Sunni and Shia Islam, a rift violently reopened by the war in Iraq. Dozens of shoes were piled on the stairway, and in a wooden shelf outside a room where men clad in customary Mahdi army garb—black shirts with black head scarves or head bands—sat listening to Sheikh Ali wail the story of Hussein’s bravery and betrayal. The men began to sob, burying their heads in their hands or between their knees. For Sheikh Ali, the story of perfidy and resistance to tyranny was a parable of his community’s current oppression at the hands of Americans and Sunnis. “They are doing the same thing with the poor children and people on the streets,” he cried out. He concluded by asking God to end the American occupation, free their hostages in Baghdad, and pray for the Mahdi Army.

On a different street I found three Sunni friends from Baquba. Firas had been shot a year earlier; his brother had been killed. He and Hamza had fled with their families to Syria one month earlier after Shia militiamen attacked their homes. Ali had been in Syria for a year and a half. In Iraq three of his uncles had been killed in front of his eyes and a cousin had also been murdered. “Because we are Sunnis,” he said, when I asked him why. “My school is gone. My father has no work. I’m never going back.”

Many of the Sunni Iraqis I knew began to feel intimidated in the fall of 2005. Sunni leaders had boycotted elections and by mid 2005 the Iraqi government, dominated by sectarian Shia Islamist parties and their militias, aggressively targeted Sunnis, who suddenly realized they were vulnerable. By early 2007 all my Sunni Iraqi friends were trying to leave Iraq. “Here Sunnis and Shias have no problems,” Firas said. “Everyone who comes to Syria is a peaceful man who wants to make a living for his family.” They all blamed the Americans and the Iraqi government for their plight, and agreed that the Syrians had been good to them.

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR32.5/rosen.php