Iraq: A Displacement Crisis
From PrariePundit:
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The NY Times and other sources are quoting Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite leader selected as one of two vice presidents, who says that 100,000 families have been displaced. I think this is at best a WAG.
Multi-National Forces-Iraq tracks those numbers and has a much lower estimate. Maj. Gen Rick Lynch said just this week:
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Another indicator for civil war would be forced population movements. And we are extremely sensitive to that. We see reports of tens of thousands of families displaced here in Iraq, and we chase down each and every one of those reports. And I'll show you detail in a minute. But we have seen some displacement, pockets of families moving, but not in large numbers....
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And this is very important. We have not been asked for any assistance for displaced civilians. The provincial government has not asked, the local governments have not asked, the national government has not asked. So if there are indeed 36,000-plus families that have been displaced, we're not seeing it. We indeed move to check every report of displaced civilians. And we were told about displaced civilian camps, and of the 16 that we were told about, we can only confirm the location of four -- one in Fallujah, one in Baghdad, one in al Kut, and one down in Basra. And then when we got the report of 500 families displaced in Basra, we went to confirm, and all we could find was 43 families. So there is indeed indications of displaced persons inside of Iraq. Some of them truly are moving because they're concerned about their own personal security or their family's security, I'm sure of that. Some of them are moving for economic reasons. Some of them are moving to be with their families. But we're not seeing internally displaced persons at the rate which causes us alarm.
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This is from the weekly press briefing this week and was available before the 100,000 estimate was published. More than likely the NY Times and the AP had people at the briefing. They also can get the transcript off the internet. It is too bad their political agenda led them to publish their reports without checking readily available data.
Iraq: A Displacement Crisis
Report from Norwegian NGO Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates 1.9m Iraqi internal refugees and 2m Iraqi refugees outside of Iraq, thus marking the largest movement of Middle Eastern population since the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.
The Iraqi cabinet voted on 29 March to move Shia Arabs out of Kirkuk to make way for a returning Kurdish population. Can't imagine this will help either the displaced-persons problem or the small civil war problem Iraq is having at the moment.
Via Iraqslogger.
More Iraqis Said to Flee Since Troop Rise
More Iraqis Said to Flee Since Troop Rise - NYTIMES, 24 Aug.
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The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.
Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.
The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of
Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north ...
Iraqis crossing US border
I think most of them are Christians fleeing persecution by the terrorist in Iraq. The San Antonio Express News has done a series of articles on the Iraqis coming across the southern border. I will try to find the link and post it.
Sickeningly familiar. Criminally worng. Again...
This:
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"But State and DHS are unlikely to admit more than 2,000 Iraqi refugees by October, U.S. officials said. Since 2003, the year of the U.S. invasion, the United States has admitted 825 Iraqi refugees, many of them backlogged applicants from the time when Saddam Hussein was in power. By comparison, the United States has accepted 3,498 Iranians in the past nine months."
Proves that DoD is not the only bureaucracy still fighting the last war. Sad. Hopefully we'll get it fixed before it's too late.
Hope you get your terp accepted...